Dolus

Arimaa is a pure strategy game which takes its roots from Chess. In fact, it can even be played using a chess board and chess pieces. The pieces (and suggested chess-equivalent pieces) are ordered in strength from strongest to weakest as follows:
Elephant = King
Camel = Queen
Horse = Rook
Dog = Bishop
Cat = Knight
Rabbit = Pawn

The goal of the game is to get one of your rabbits to the opposite side of the board. At the game start, the starting (gold) player can set up your pieces in any formation in the first two rows of the board. Then, the second (silver) player may respond and set up his side of the board as he chooses. All pieces share the same movement, being able to move orthoganlly forward, backward, left, or right, except for the rabbit, which can’t move backwards. Players make 4 moves per turn. Additionally, a stronger pieces may push a weaker opposing piece by moving the weaker opposing piece into one of its adjacent spaces, and then moving your stronger piece into the now vacant space. Stronger pieces can also pull weaker pieces into its space and move itself into an adajacent space. It takes an extra movement to push or pull another piece.

Weaker pieces that are standing next to a stronger piece and no friendly pieces are frozen in place and can’t move. There are also four spaces on the board that are Trap spaces, and any piece on a trap space without a friendly piece adjacet to it is immediately captured.

This game is in many ways like Chess in that all game information is public-knowledge and the game is deterministic and highly strategical. However, it is much more difficult to make a capture and there are so many possible moves in a turn (over 16,000!) that it is not always obvious what the best move is. Additionally, since you have 8 different pieces that can all win you the game by getting any one to the other side, this allows players to still be in the game and posing a valid threat to the opponent after having lost many strong pieces. In fact, I won one game with only 5 rabbits left alive at the end. Even my elephant was captured! Though I’ll admit, I sacrificed my elephant for the last-turn win.

The components in this game are great. The pieces are clearly identifiable and unique. They’re weighted well so they don’t easily fall over. In fact, I often have to push them over deliberately to put them back in the box. The board itself can be flipped over and used as a regular chess board. And since you can also play the game with a regular chess set, it makes the game widely accessible to try out. Though I do greatly enjoy the game much more with the Arimaa set.

The rules are pretty simple and straightforward, although there can seem to be a few nuances and special exceptions, such as rabbits being unable to move backward.

All in all, I highly recommend this game and encourage you to try it out!

Bohnanza is a bean trading game where you have a hand full of bean cards, two plots of soil in front of you, and you try to plant as many of the same type of bean as you can before uprooting the plot. You can trade beans with other players, and sometimes giving away a bean to another player is in your best interest!

Some of the unique twists in Bohnanza is that you are NOT allowed to organize the cards in your hand. When you draw more cards, they are added to the back of your hand. On your turn, you start by playing the first bean in your hand onto a plot, and optionally the second bean in your hand. Then you flip over the top three bean cards, which you can either plant yourself or trade away/with other players. Players can trade with what’s in their hand and/or among the beans in play, but only with the active player. All traded beans, no matter where they came from, must be immediately played, and any revealed beans that the active player does not trade away, whether by choice or because nobody wanted them, must be played by that active player.

At any time during the game, you may uproot one of your bean plots, and depending on which bean type you uprooted, you’ll get so much gold for having at least the specified number of beans. For example, a red bean will give you 1 coin for 2 beans, and up to 4 coins for 5 beans whereas a soy bean will give you 1 coin for 2 beans, but only 4 coins for 7 beans. There are also a different number of total cards for each bean, so red beans are rarer than soy beans. You may be forced to uproot one of your bean piles if you’re forced to play a bean that you haven’t already played, and you don’t have any available plots to plant in. Additionally, the game ends after going through the deck 3 times, and gold is acquired by flipping over that many bean cards and keeping them. So if there are 8 red beans in the deck, and you trade in 5 of them for 4 coins, then for the rest of the game there are only 3 red beans left, making them even rarer. You are allowed to purchase a third bean plot later in the game for 3 coin.

The components are excellent. All you use are cards, and the cards have great and amusing artwork on them. They also include very clearly and concisely the value of the bean type and how many of those beans there are in the deck. The box has an insert to hold all of the cards so they don’t fall around inside the box, and at the same time keeping the box to a small size. 5/5 for components.

The rules for the game are short, concise, and easy to understand. I love them. The only part I strongly dislike is that there are certain beans you play with or remove from the deck based on the number of players. This definitely helps balance gameplay which is great, but these little nuances in the rules based on player number as well as the annoyance of having to go through the entire deck to remove certain cards can be annoying. Rules are 4/5.

Gameplay is surprisingly fun. I never thought I would have so much fun trading beans, or even giving away beans when I desperately didn’t want them. The game is simple, short, but fun and keeps all players actively engaged even when it isn’t their turn due to the trading aspect. 5/5.

I would definitely recommend this game for nearly anybody who enjoys games. It is great from family, social, and casual gamers with its simplicity and player interaction, but also for strategy and avid players because it also requires planning and forethought into hand management and negotiation to get what you need on your side of the board, as well as to get rid of what you don’t want from your hand! Hardcore power gamers might not find much in this game, unless if they enjoy the occasional simple, fun game.

Memoir ’44 is a great historical 2-player wargame that can be played in an hour or less. The game takes place in 1944, towards the end of WWII, Allies vs. Axis. There are many scenarios to choose from, and many expansions to this game to add even more scenarios and add to the games replayability.

In gameplay, the board is set up for a particular scenario, and then the Axis and Allies player each take their allocated number of cards. You play one card per trun. These cards tell you which types or units or which location of units and how many can be moved. You move and attack with those units, using dice to show hits and retreats on the enemies side. The goal is to acquire a required number of medals. Each medal is won by either defeating an enemy unit or completing a mission objective (such as holding a bridge).

The components are fantastic. The board is a good-sized six-fold board, double sided for ground or shore battles. The game comes with adequate tiles to customize each board for any scenario, adding rivers, bridges, bunkers, forests, and more! The units are also well designed miniatures for infantry, tanks, and artillery. There are also other miniatures including sandbags and hedgehogs. The units are the same for both sides, except that they are different colors. The good part of this is that it’s easier to recognize units from both sides. The bad side is some people like unique units to represent each army. The general units, though, also allow the Allies units to represent US troops, or French troops, or more. So the units are very reusable for different campaigns and scenarios.

The rulebook is well-organized, clear, and covered with many graphics and examples to explain gameplay. There are a lot of minor rules to remember for special tiles or units, but included with the deck are cards with reminder text for each of these special rules so you don’t have to constantly reference the rulebook. These cards are very concise and clear.

The dice in the game definitely add some randomness to it, but overall the game is designed such that the dice alone won’t ruin an experience. Superior troop commanding should regularly win over luck.

The game is also very quick. It does take some time to set up with all the units and tiles, but I’ve never had a game last over an hour. And I’ve always felt fulfilled after playing a game of Memoir ’44. I can’t wait to get this on the table more often. One of my favorite aspects of this game is that it’s a 2-player game that’s fast, simple, and fun, makign it something I can play with my wife or with one friend when we’re not having a big game night.

If you wish you had a game that could be played with only 2 players, I would recommend this game. Especially if you want something short, simple, and enjoy wargames or historical games. This game also makes a great gateway into more wargames.

Coloretto is a card game where each card is the same except for being one of many different colors (or a wildcard color). The goal of the game is to collect as many cards as possible of any three colors, but as few or no cards in any other color. Players do this by taking turns either drawing a card and placing it on any one of multiple piles (equal to the number of players), or by taking all of the cards in a pile. There can’t be any more than 3 cards on a pile, so eventually players will be forced to take a pile instead of drawing more cards from the deck. Towards the bottom of the deck, fifteen cards from the bottom to be exact, is an “end of round” card, which designates that after the last pile is taken, the round is over and scoring is taken. Wild cards can be placed in any color stack. Any three colors can be chosen by a player for positive points. Every other color scores negative points. The value of the points increases based on the number of cards you have as follows, but more than 6 cards doesn’t add to your score at all (but neither does it detract from your score!).

1 card = 1 point
2 cards = 3 points
3 cards = 6 points
4 cards = 10 points
5 cards = 15 points
6+ cards = 21 points

That’s about it for rules. Pretty simple. But strategy is a whole ‘nother game. You need to decide when it is worth it to draw a pile before it’s full of three cards so that other players don’t put unwanted cards there or take the pile before you, or decide if it’s worth it to keep filling it up with more cards. You also need to decide where to place a color such that the pile will be desirable to you, but not your opponents, but also to add undesirable colors to an opponent’s desired pile. For instance, adding a blue card to a pile with two yellow cards when the player is collecting yellow, green, and blue.

Replayability: Since this game is high on an abstract level, it has a lot of replayability. However, since the game is so highly abstract, it won’t hold interest long for many players who want a theme.

Components: The cards are good quality, but there’s nothing to the game besides cards. The color is the only difference between cards is the color, which is very clear in distinguishing cards from each other. So there’s a plus.

Easy to Learn: This is one of the easiest games to learn. The rules are pretty much what I explained above. So this is a great game easy to learn game.

Overall, I would highly recommend this game as either a filler game or for players who love abstract strategy (such as Go or Chess). However, if you are looking for a theme or long-lasting game with a lot going on, this game may seem too simplistic for more than a filler game. But even as a filler game, it is really fun.

Quarriors! is a 2-4 player dice game with a deck-building mechanic in how it’s played. The currency of the game is quiddity and players spend quiddity for spells and creatures, which gain them glory points. The first player to score enough glory points wins the game! (20 pts for 2 players, 15 for 3 players, 12 for 4 players)

The game comes with unique cards representing the different spells and warriors, and each coordinates with a particular die. There are three base cards always used, 3 random spells, and 7 random monsters. Since some spells/monsters share the same dice, you only use one of them during a given game. The cards have a picture for the creature, show all possible sides on the die, and describe any special abilities the die has.

Players put starting dice into a dice bag, draw 6 dice per turn, and on their turn roll the dice to see what they actually have. Since the game revolves around rolling dice, there is definitely luck involved in what you roll, but each dice is centralized around a basic concept, so the distribution on the sides of the die are fair. For instance, a warriors die might have 3 sides that give you quiddity, but 3 sides that give you a monster. All of the warriors sides might be the same, or one might be slightly stronger.

Warriors have a summoning cost (or level), attack power, and defense power marked on them. When players summon warriors, The full attack power is summed up and that much damage is dealt to every other players’ warriors. Each player assigns the damage, one warrior at a time, until all the damage has been absorbed or all of their warriors have been defeated. When your turn comes around again, if you still have your warriors in play, they collect glory points for you and are discarded.

Replayability:
This game is decently replayable. There are many monsters and spells in the game, which are dealt out randomly to show what the game setup will be, allowing for numerous possibilities. The aspect of die-rolling with so many dice is uncommon, although seen before, so it adds a level of uniqueness to the game and the randomness means every game will be different. The game doesn’t hold my interest as long as other games do, but I still really enjoy it.

Components:
The components are excellent, but I have a few problems with them. First of all, the scoring track goes from 1-20 in 4 rows of 5. But instead of reading left-to-right, top-to-bottom, it flows in a zig-zag pattern. They did add a line along this to help demonstrate the direction scoring goes, but since they also put a large Q in the background, it doesn’t stand out, making it difficult to score properly unless if you’re really focused.

The cards are amazing. The artwork is great and the pictures of what the dice have on them is great for knowing what you could roll and also even greater for verifying what you rolled when you can’t fully read the die.

The dice are awesome. They are custom with various symbols, they’re very beautiful, and there are very few symbols on them that players have to memorize. These are all huge pluses. However, the problem with dice is that no two are exactly alike in how they’re made, and images tend to bleed and/or blur. So sometimes it’ll be difficult to read your warrior’s power, defense, or cost. This can usually be remedied by consulting the card, but is still an inconvenience. Finally, the portal die is poorly done in that there is a number inside the swirly portal picture, making it inherently difficult to read what number you rolled, which is only made worse by the fact that the dice images are blurred already.

Ease of Learning:
This game is very easy to learn and play quickly. Especially if you’ve played deck-building games before, this game will be very simple to pick up. There will be a few card descriptions or dice interactions that don’t make sense at first or will take some effort to figure out, but the amount of this is minimal.

All in all, this is an excellent game. I don’t see it lasting as long in replayability as my other games, but it would be something I would always have fun pulling out and playing a game with somebody and rolling dice. I definitely recommend it.

Summoner Wars is a Living Card Game (you get what you buy, there are no ‘random’ booster packs, but you can still modify your deck) that has some feel to it like Magic where you are summon creatures, have spells, and are trying to defeat your opponent, except you’re playing on a grid with obstructions like a D&D map. The payment for your summons comes from killing your opponent’s monsters and by discarding other cards instead of playing them. You are also controlling your summoner as a character on the board. You can move forward to attack your opponent, or retreat back and keep him in safety.

Each deck has three wall cards that take up one space each. These wall cards are placed anywhere on your side of the battlefield when you play them. They allow you to summon monsters from them, and also obstruct view and movement from your opponent.

The artwork on the cards is incredible. The designers also placed numbers and clear symbols on the card to explain cost, damage, and life points. The only confusing part to me is that I expect the creature cost and damage to be switched, so I frequently make that mistake when I’m planning my turn. Otherwise, attack is marked clearly to indicate that it’s attack power, and not cost.

The mana mechanic of discarding cards to be able to summon in future turns is also an interesting mechanic in that it encourages you to trash your entire hand frequently to dig through your deck quickly and play your big heavy spells. The master set comes with many decks and there are more you can purchase so there are many different options to choose from.

Summoner Wars fits well as a filler game or a quick strategy game between two players. It is quick to learn and quick to play. I really enjoy this game, and would recommend it for anybody who likes collectible or living card games.

Skip Bo is a great, light family game. It plays 2-6 players, and is played much like the card game Kings on the Corner, if you’re familiar with that.

The game is equivalent to having 3 full playing decks, with the jokers acting as wild cards. Each player has 30 cards in their deck, and 4 discard piles in front of them. At the start of their turn, or when they run out of cards in their hand, you draw until you have 5 cards in hand. There are four columns in the center where players play their cards, starting at 1 and going down to 12. Players play as much as they can or wish to, using cards from their hand and discard pile, and finish their turn by discarding a card to one of their 4 discard piles. This requires careful forethought on what you’re laying down because once you cover up a card in your discard pile, you can’t access it until you get rid of the card on top of it.

When a column reaches 12, the column is removed from play and a new column started in its place. Play continues until one player plays their last card. A player scores 25 points plus 5 points for every card their opponent has left. The first player to 500 points is the winner.

The game is more involved than most playing card games, and this game requires some planning and foresight in how you set up your columns, but overall the game is pretty basic and simple. It’s great for families, but for gamers, it isn’t too exciting. Nothing more than a filler game.

Cities & Knights is a Settlers of Catan expansion that introduces knights, barbarians, and more to the mix. In fact, this game adds so much that it changes the game and strategy drastically, and many players never go back to base Settlers after playing Cities & Knights.

Each turn, players roll an additional die. The results of this die can move barbarians closer to attacking, give bonus cards to players who have city improvements (explained later). Players can also build soldiers, and activate them with wheat. Soldiers have various abilities and are mobile, but their most notable ability is that when the barbarians attack, the collective power of all soldiers in Catan are compared against the power of the barbarians, which is equal to the number of cities in Catan. If Catan loses, the player(s) contributing the fewest soldiers lose their cities to a settlement. If Catan wins, the singular player contributing the most soldiers gets a victory point, or a bonus card if multiple players tie for the most soldiers.

The other aspect of this game is the concept of city improvements. Wood, wool, and ore now all produce a special trade good instead of a second resource for adjacent cities. These trade goods can be traded for city improvements in one of the three areas. After enough improvements, these can be worth up to two points each, and even provide protection for one of your cities from the barbarians.

There is much more added to the game, but these are the major changes to the game. The components that have been added are great. There are many more wood components, a lot of new cards with excellent artwork, and more tiles for the board.

With all of the new additions, this game is also has more complicated rules. The new rules set will take more time to comprehend and get used to, but if you’re willing to invest the time for it, it’s worth it.

C&K takes the Catan series from a simple family game to a higher level abstract strategy game. If you want to keep the game simple, stick with Settlers and Seafarers, but if you’re getting bored with the simplicity of Settlers, pick up C&K.

This expansion is great to allow more players to play the original Settlers of Catan game at once. Even if you don’t have more players, the additional tiles let you expand the game area, so players aren’t struggling as much to expand.

This game comes with additional components and tile pieces to accomodate up to two more players (up to 6 total). Adding additional players can make the game last longer, but there is a rule to account for this; at the end of each players’ turn, everybody is allowed to build in player order. This helps both prevent the long downtime between turns, and also to cut down your hand size in case if the robber gets rolled. This latter part is very important because otherwise you would get so many cards before your turn came, that you could fill up your hand and otherwise not have the opportunity to avoid a robber if it came up on your turn or just before your turn.

Settlers of Catan is recognized as the biggest gateway game from Hasbro and Parker Brothers games into the gaming community. In Settlers of Catan, you build settlements, cities, and roads on a tiled map to collect resources until you have enough points to win.

The map is different every game because it is randomly constructed with hexagonal tiles and surrounded by hexagonal sea pieces. On each hexagon, a number ranging from 2 to 12 is placed on it, and whenever that number is rolled, all players with a settlement or city adjacent to that hex collects the resource that tile provides.

Resources that can be collected are sheep, ore, wood, brick, and wheat, which can be exchanged to build settlements (1 point), upgrade settlements to cities (2 points), build roads (2 points for having the longest road), or purchase cards. The cards can be used to help your position in the game, or to move the robber token onto a new hex (2 points for moving the robber the most times). The robber prevents his hex from producing resources, and when placed, the placer may steal a card from a player whose settlement or city is adjacent to that hex.

The rules are very simple in this game, but new players do have difficulty, mostly with the rule that settlements and cities must be at least a distance of 2 away from each other.

The components are fairly well done for the most part. The player pieces are simplistic, but are wooden shapes for each component. The tiles are of good quality, but if you end up with different version of the game and expansion like I did, the difference in tile design can be confusing. Also, some versions come with water tiles, and some versions come with a water border that snaps together like a puzzle. The puzzle border is nicer for keeping the tiles from shifting during play, but the sea hexes are nicer for expanding the map when and if you play with the seaside expansion.

This game looses some of it’s appeal as players get into other bigger games, but it’s still a fun classic to return to and is always an excellent game to introduce new players to.

Rattus takes place in Europe in 1347, during the Black Death. The goal is to have the highest population on the map at the end of the game.

The board starts out with a rat token on every space, on “plague man” token at a random starting location on the map, and each player puts two cubes each on any two countries.

In a given turn, a player has the option to take a role card (whether somebody already has it or not), place a number of population units in a country equal to the number of rats in that country, use the ability of any and all of their roles before or after placing their population on the board, and then move the plague man to one adjacent space. When a plague lands, you’ll add rat tokens to adjacent spaces, and if there are rat tokens and people in the country he landed in, then rat tokens will flip over, possibly killing people to the Black Death until all rat tokens or all people in that country are gone.

The rat tokens, when flipped, activate and kill units if the population in that country is at least as big as the number on the rat token. The rat token has symbols for who all dies in that region; M for whoever has the most units, A for all players losing one unit, and symbols for each of the role cards, whoever has that role loses a unit.

There are six role cards
-The King lets you save your populace into the palace, where they are safe until the end of the game
-The Peasant lets you place an additional unit when placing units
-The Witch lets you look at any two rat tokens and switch them if you wish
-The Merchant lets you move up to three of your guys from one region to an adjacent region
-The Monk moves a rat token from one space to an adjacent space
-The Knight lets you move the plague man two spaces and optionally have him count as two cubes when seeing if the rats kill people

Pros:
-Quick and simple rules
-Replayable time and time again
-Expansions to vary play and roles
-The role cards are thick, sturdy pieces of cardboard and the artwork is good for the roles and the board

Cons:
-There’s quite a bit of randomness in who eventually wins
-Optionally never taking roles, while less fun, could be more rewarding
-The pieces are cubes, which aren’t too exciting, but are okay
-The board doesn’t lay perfectly flat right out of the box

Stone Age is a simplistic worker-placement type game where each round players take turns placing their meeples on the board to obtain various resources, food, huts, cards, or improving your village. At the end of each round, you need to feed your people at a cost of one food per meeple.

When acquiring resources, you roll dice equal to your number of meeples, and divide by some value which increases for rarer resources to see how many of a resource you get. Resources are spent to purchase cards or huts, which give you points. You can improve your village by acquiring an additional meeple (10 max), acquiring tools which you can add to your die roll for resources/food, or by increasing the count of how much food you automatically produce each turn for feeding your meeples.

The artwork of the game is great, and the components are pretty good. It comes with a soft dice cup for rolling the dice, which fits the theme of stone age well, but is really soft and a little flimsy.

Overall, it’s a good game. For a family game, it’s great. For more avid gamers, there are better worker-placement games out there that can replace this.

Pros:
-Simplistic rules for easy play
-Rules scale the game well for 2-4 players
-Great introduction to worker-placement style games

Cons:
-Requires doing math in your head when collecting resources and rolling dice (division and addition)
-Too simplistic for more avid gamers

Shadows Over Camelot is a co-op board game where the knights of the round table face many difficult and arduous quests to defend Camelot. By completing quests, knights acquire white swords for the round table, and by failing quests, knights acquire black swords for the round table. Once the table has 12 swords, if the majority are white, the good knights win. Otherwise, they all lose. The knights also lose if all knights die or if 12 siege engines accumulate outside of Camelot.

A turn goes as follows:
-Progress evil by either adding a siege engine, losing 1 health, or drawing and resolving a black card. Black cards usually go towards harming the knights in completing their quests, but they can also have more dire effects as well.
-Take a heroic action, which can be moving to a new location, playing a ‘good’ white card from their hand, typically towards the completion of a quest, or drawing two white cards if they’re at Camelot.
-Doing a second different heroic action at the cost of 1 life point.
-At any time during a player’s turn, he can use his character’s special ability.

Some of the quests that can be completed include retrieving Excalibur from the lake, finding the Holy Grail, defeating the black knight, fighting saxons, and more.

Shadows Over Camelot also adds a traitor aspect where the game may or may not have a traitor in the game. This player is trying to sabotage the quests and make the knights lose the game. When the progression of evil is bad enough, players can accuse others of being the traitor, scoring either white swords for being correct, or black swords for being incorrect. Throughout the game, opportunities arise where the traitor can oust himself in order to do something terrible to the other knights. Then, for the rest of the game, the traitor hinders the knights by either discarding their white cards or adding siege engines.

Overall, I think this game is a lot of fun. It’s a good co-op game that is fairly resistant to a single player trying to reign control of all of the other players due to not being allowed to say what’s in your hand. Somebody can still play dominantly to a small extent though.
The components are amazing. They have color-coded dice for each knight to represent health, and fully designed miniatures for each knight, saxons, quest rewards, and more. The board is designed with beautiful artwork and clear designated locations for each character that can be placed at every quest. The box also has great storage for all of the pieces, which is always hard to come by in a game.

Pros:
-Turns are simple
-Excellent components and artwork
-Great replayability
-Fun theme

Cons:
-The game starts to feel easy after a lot of play. The traitor helps to balance this to some extent.
-Some rules can be a little confusing

This expansion to Dixit changes nothing about the base game, but simply adds many more cards to an already fun game. With the extra cards, players can opt for a longer game, swap in and out cards, and simply have a larger pool of cards to draw fun.

If you’re unfamiliar with the base game, Dixit is a simple, but incredibly fun, storytelling-style game where you give a clue or phrase to a card you’re playing. Everybody else plays a card of their own to match your clue, and then they all try to guess at which card is yours! Points are scored for right guesses, or for people wrongfully guessing yours when you’re not the storyteller. The storyteller scores points if they were successful in having at least one player guess their card, but not everybody.

This game plays with as few as 3, but is best with 5 or 6.

Pros:
Beautiful artwork on the cards
Fair scoring system
Simple straightforward rules
A fun casual game for all variety of players

Cons:

Requires creative and imaginative players

In Dixit, everybody has a hand of cards with artwork on each card. Each round, one player will pick a card in their hand, say a word or phrase that describes the card, but is obscure enough that not everybody will guess his/her card, and lays the card down. Every other player picks a card in their own hand to match the word or phrase that was said. Then all cards are revealed simultaneously, and everybody except the “storyteller” votes on which card belonged to the storyteller.

Anybody who wasn’t a storyteller that had somebody wrongfully guess their card scores that many points. The storyteller scores points as long as at least one person guessed their card, but not everybody. Everybody who correctly guessed the storyteller’s card also scores points.

The artwork on the cards are beautiful. The cards are oversized, and the art fills the entire card. The pictures are all very unusual, which contributes to players coming up with creative or obscure phrases. The strangeness of the cards also allows players to interpret many different cards in many different ways.

This game plays with as few as 3, but is best with 5 or 6.

Pros:
Beautiful artwork on the cards
Fair scoring system
Simple straightforward rules
A fun casual game for all variety of players

Cons:
Requires creative and imaginative players

Small World seems simple to understand. There are many race banners and many ability banners which get randomly paired together to create a race/ability combination. This creates nearly limitless combinations making every game a different experience.

Players pick a race/ability combination and use the race tokens to spread out and conquest regions on the board representing Small World. Due to the size of the board, players are constantly conquesting each other’s territories while their race diminishes over time, until the owner decides it is time to put their race into decline, which is where the owner stops running their race and picks a new race to start playing.

Figuring out conquests is relatively simple. The number of race tokens you need to use to conquer a territory is equal to the number of cardboard pieces in the region (whatever they may be) plus 2. There are a couple pieces you can’t conquer, though, such as a dragon. Many players still have difficulty understanding this, however.

The part of the game that is difficult for players to understand and grasp is how every race/ability pairing works. Each of these have their own symbols to show what they do, so nearly every pairing players need to look up how the race or ability works. This tends to be too much information for players to hold.

There are many pieces and components to this board game and all with great artwork to them.

Now the strategy of the game seems very simple, you take your race tokens, and conquest other regions, score points, and see who wins. But to get into the advanced play, it is much more difficult, there is a lot of strategy to it, and it’s not nearly as easy as it looks.

This game is ideal for 2 players, but plays up to 4.

Pros:
-High-level of abstract strategy
-Relatively simple/straightforward rules
-Excellent artwork and design
-Map scales well to the number of players

Cons:
-Race/abilities are widely varied and need to be frequently referenced
-The strategy is far too abstract for most players to enjoy
-The scoring system is hidden, making it difficult to keep track of how well you are doing

7 Wonders is a great new game for 3-7 players to build a wonder during 3 ages. In each age, players draft and play cards specific to that age to acquire wealth, military, resources, science, and more to assist themselves in building their 3-part wonder and scoring more points. Each wonder is different and offers different rewards to the player for each part of the wonder that has been built.

The artwork is very detailed and high quality. There are a lot of great and creative cards in this game as well, so I highly recommend getting sleeves for all of the cards.

The game is relatively easy to teach. There is definitely a learning curve, but it is small. This is a great gamer’s game as it has a lot of strategy. After players learn to play the game, it takes many plays for them to start learning good and bad strategy.

A winning score at the end of the game is high 60’s to low 70’s in points. Scores are typically 45 points and up at the end of a game.

Pros:
-Relatively easy to learn
-Short playing time (~30-45 minutes)
-Has a great expansion for it already
-Loads of fun

Cons:
-Opponents going for a similar strategy hurts your strategy due to the limited number of cards being available.

The Pied Piper expansion creates more replayability opportunities because it creates three new role cards for each category! Their abilities all operate in a similar manner to their originals, but are significantly different to give you a very different feel for the game.

This expansion also includes game components to be used by some of the cards, such walls that are impassable.

One role that we are happy to switch out is the witch role. While I’ve been having fun grabbing the witch and tinkering with different strategy ideas, we have never come up with a good winning strategy for her. The other witch/replacement roles add a lot more to be more appealing for players to take.

The only downside to this expansion is that it is slightly more complicated than the base game, so it will take a little more effort for some gamers to understand.

USA 1910 reprints the cards from Ticket to Ride and includes additional route and bonus cards. It also adds variants to how you can play the game. Some variants are using only big city route tickets, or only long route tickets. The cards are clearly marked to distinguish which cards can be used in a given variant.

The cards are also larger than they were in the base game. This makes it much easier to hold the cards in your hand and shuffle through to look at what you’re holding. So even if you want to play the base game, the cards reprinted in this expansion are a great replacement for the original cards.

If you have and enjoy Ticket to Ride, I highly suggest getting this expansion with it.

Fluxx is a card game of ever-changing rules. The basic rules at the game start is you draw 1 card and play 1 card. Everybody starts with 3 cards.

The 4 card types you can play are:
Keepers: Cards you play and keep in front of you to help meet a win condition
Goals: Defines the win condition. Usually this is having two specific keeper cards in play under your control. There may be only one goal card at a time.
Rules: Change the rules of the game by having players draw additional cards, play additional cards, have a hand/keeper/goals limit change, or other more crazy game changing rules.
Actions: Have you do something immediately. The action is specified on the card.

This game is very random but full of silly fun, making a good casual game in moderation. It is a bit too random to be liked by most people though.

Pros:
-Creative
-Short
-Silly fun

Cons:
-Random
-Ever-changing rules can be difficult to grasp for some people

Uno is a simplistic game where you are trying to get rid of all cards in your hand. You play cards by matching value or color of the last card played. You can also play wild cards to change the suit. Additional cards skip the next player’s turn, force the next player to draw two or four cards, or reverse the direction of play.

This ganme includes minimal strategy. It is a good game for kids, family, or non-gamers, but for most gamers, Uno offers little and will not entertain for very long.

Pit is a surprisingly addictive resource trading/collecting game. You start with a hand of 9 cards, and your goal is to trade resources with other players, 1, 2, or 3 uniform resources at a time, until you have 9 resources of the same type. You score the value of those resources for the round and start a new round until one player reaches 500 points and wins. The number of resources in the game is equal to the number of players and there are exactly 9 resources of each type.

The game also includes the option for adding a bear and bull to the game, which would give two players hands of 10 cards. These can be traded with other resources. The bull is essentially a wildcard, scoring you bonus points if you have all 9 resources AND the bull card. The bear is a card you don’t want and can’t go out if it’s in your hand. You lose points if you didn’t go out and have the bear and/or bull in your hand at the end of a round.

This game plays well with any number, but the more the merrier.
The cards are pretty simplistic, but mine got very grimy after a lot of plays. So the quality of the cards don’t seem to be that great.
The deluxe version comes with a service bell you ring when you go out. This is much more fun than the regular version which just comes with a center card you slap.

Pros:
-Good artwork
-The bell in the deluxe version is fun!
-This game is loud and active

Cons:
-Limited strategy, but a fun filler or casual game
-Card quality is somewhat poor
-This game is loud and active

When I introduced this to my gaming friends, we had about 15 people in one house for a weekend, and we woke everybody up to this game early in the morning. This is because trades are done by shouting the number of cards you want to trade; 1, 2, or 3. This game gets very loud and hectic.

The Leaders expansion provides depth to the base 7 Wonders game by adding more. At the start of the game, the players draft 4 leader cards, passing them to the right. Three times during the game, before each age, you can play one of your leaders as you would an age card; you can discard it for gold, play it to build your wonder, or play it as a leader for its benefit. There is even a new wonder for this Leaders mechanic that allows the player to acquire and play more leaders.

Some affects the leaders brings with them could be:
-providing you with extra gold
-allowing you to build leaders for free
-science or military expansions
-score points based on having certain cards or your neighbors having certain cards

If you like 7 Wonders, this is an excellent expansion to have.

You can teach this when you introduce the game to new players, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Most players should start with the base game first. This expansion adds a lot more to think about when you make decisions. In fact, for players new to this expansion, you will be looking in the rulebook frequently to figure out what your leaders do.

Pros:
-Expands the game, adding features to it
-Is a lot of fun without detracting from the original game
-Can affect the direction or focus you take in the game

Cons:
-Many leaders have foreign symbols that you need to either memorize or look up

This is one of my favorites. Nuns on the Run is a sort of reverse deduction game where there is one player controlling two nuns trying to stop up to six “runners” from finding their dream and returning back to their rooms with it.

As a runner, you pick from among various movement types. The further it allows you to move, the higher risk you have of a nun hearing you. You sneak through and past the nuns to find a key to your dream, then you grab your dream, and try to be the first runner back to your starting quarters to win.

Meanwhile, the nuns each pick a fixed route to take. The nuns move along those routes, also with varying speed options which allow them better hearing. If a runner passes through a nun’s line of sight or a nun hears a runner, then the nun can start moving on their own in the direction of the sight/noise to catch the runner.

Pros:
Movement decisions (and consequences) are public and can be used to your advantage or to deceive other players.
There is limited random events in the game, which makes the game mostly about skill and strategy, but there is enough randomness that the game maintains re-playability over time.
The artwork is amusing and well done.

Cons:
All players except for the nuns move secretly, so it looks like nothing is happening. For many players, this is a deal-breaker in a game.
The nuns are forced upon their path after choosing one until such time that they happen to hear a runner or spot one.

Mr. Jack is a simple 2-player deduction game where Jack the Ripper has gone undercover as one of 8 characters. The game lasts a maximum of 8 rounds, after which, Jack wins the game. After each round, Jack will tell the other player if Jack is “in the light” or “in the dark”. Jack is in the light by being adjacent to another character or a lamp post, or by being in the line of sight of Watson’s lamp.

Each round, each player moves 2 characters, for 4 characters per round, and using all 8 characters every 2 rounds. There is some alternating between each other when you choose which character(s) to move, and each has their own abilities. So there is a lot of difficulty in deciding which character to move for the most added benefit, or which character to move to prevent your opponent from taking that character.

At any point during the game, the good player can move a character onto a suspect’s location and accuse that player of being Jack. The game ends immediately and if the accuser is correct, he wins. Otherwise, Jack wins. Also, if Jack was in the dark the previous end of round, then he is able to escape from the city if he is close enough to an exit.

The components in this game are very sturdy, very well designed and colorful, and altogether is a great quality game with excellent components. The board is very easy to look at and recognize everything that is on the board for what it is.

There is decent replay value for this for a while, but after both players become really good, the final accusation at the end of the game is more of a guess as to who the other player is. But it will take a lot of plays and work to reach this point.

Some things that will change on the board is lamp-posts will move and also go out entirely (puts characters in the light), manholes will move (block passageways), police barriers will move (blocks escape routes for Jack), and of course, the characters will constantly move around.

Pros:
-Great asthetics
-Balanced gameplay
-Excellent strategy component
-Ever-changing board

Cons:
-Only 2 player. We tried more, but it doesn’t work very well :p It’s like a co-op where everybody’s fighting over control of the players

Yggdrasil is another co-op game with a strong Norse Gods theme to it.

Pros:
-Co-op play puts everybody on the same team
-Independent play – this is what I look for in any co-op game so no one person takes control of the game
-Lots of options to take on your turn
-You don’t feel overwhelmed despite the difficult monsters you’re facing
-The right action is not obvious, giving you more choice in how to play
-Beautifully designed pieces and graphics

Cons:
-There are many options, which can seem overwhelming
-The format of the board makes it unclear what actions are available to take
-When ice trolls block a particular action, it’s not immediately clear which action they’re blocking

Just like many other co-ops, players take on different characters who each have their own special ability to help on their quest. Ultimately, your goal is to fight back these monsters until the entire deck is depleted and to not have too many monsters advance too far on the monster track. Actions you can take on your turn include fighting a monster to push it back, pulling out of a bag full of dwarves and fire giants to recruit dwarves for reinforcements, pull out of the bag to remove fire giants, put dwarves into a bag, collect/upgrade weapons to fight back monster, recruit elves for support, and advance a track for bonus actions depending on how far the track advances.

These are a lot of options, and it can be a tad overwhelming. But it adds to the diversity of the game which to me makes it a lot more fun than many other co-ops that could be played by just one person.

In Apples to Apples, you have a hand of nouns, and you’ll take turns being the judge. The judge flips over a green card which is an adjective. Every other player tosses in a card that they think is best described by that adjective. The judge then chooses which red card is the winner, and that player gets to keep the green card. Based on the number of players, the first player to obtain the required number of green cards wins!

Pros:
There are so many cards that this game has significant replay value
You can take many approaches to the game, picking cards that closely match the card, cards that are the most funny the most opposite of the card, the options are endless

Cons:
There are times when you don’t have any cards to match the current adjective
Some players will resent certain ways of playing. For instance, I like to take a comedic approach to the game and pick the funniest cards, but some people think you should always do the most appropriately matching card.

The cards in this game are good quality, but pretty simple, no unique pictures or anything. Each card even comes with suggestions or descriptions if you’re stuck or aren’t familiar with what is on the card. There is a wide variety of nouns and adjectives, so all ages can play the game.

I finally had a chance to try this game out a couple weeks ago, and no wonder it’s been reprinted!

Pros:
The game has a relatively fixed game length
The randomness is somewhat predictible depending on how well you know the game
There is a lot of player interaction, whether you’re helping each other or trying to have sea serpents eat your opponents

Cons:
There’s a lot of randomness involved in what happens when tiles flipped, what the die roll comes up as, when the game ends, etc.
Very easy to die. But that’s part of the fun!
When the game ends early, it can favor players who went first, they get more turns
Some special case rules are unclear or confusing (we couldn’t confirm if we could move from one boat to another in the sea)

Survive! is a fun game where you everybody is populating a small island in the center of the board and you are trying to get as many of your people to safety on the edge of the board fighting the sinking island, sea monsters, sharks, and other horrors.

This game is a classic and is very popular. Each player can share boats, move in boats together (controlled by the player with the most guys in it or everyone in it if they’re tied), move monsters towards opponents, monsters away from your end goal. I’ll always remember my first game when we surrounded one corner with a shark, a whale, and three sea serpents. Not many people survived there.

The different people are also worth different amounts of points on them, so getting the most people to safety doesn’t mean you win. You have to be careful and strategic to rescue your high-valued people and be willing to sacrifice the low pointers. So don’t forget where your big people are!

Ticket to Ride is BG Gold for a reason. From casual to family to avid players and more, all player types can love this game! You are given multiple route cards you are trying to complete by collecting colored train cards to complete routes connecting the cities on your ticket.

Pros:
-Simple rules
-Fun for all players
-Great artwork
-Awesome components
-Online play
-Many expansions

Cons:
-There are a lot of colors to consider while playing, and you often fill your hand with mostly useless cards if you draw from the deck
-Finding your way around the map can be tedious

The rules to this game are very simple. You can take one of three actions each turn. You start by getting tickets you are trying to complete, which will tell you two cities you need to connect to complete it. Then you will collect colored train cards which, when you have enough, you can use to create a route between two cities. You complete enough continuous routes to connect your two cities together on your ticket, completing that ticket and scoring points for it at the end of the game.

Be careful though, if the game ends and you have uncompleted tickets, you will lose those points! So be careful when selecting tickets that you pick tickets that work well together.

The artwork on the board and cards is fantastic, bright, and colorful. The components are also amazing, every player has a lot of train pieces to build their routes with.

All in all, this is a wonderful game.

In Pandemic, you and your friends are racing to find four cures for four diseases spreading around the world. Each turn you have the opportunity to find a cure, cure the disease, slow the spread of infection, and more.

Pros:
Co-op play puts everybody on the same side
The epidemic card mechanic allows some predictibility of cards to come
High replayability due to the randomness of the cards

Cons:
The openness in the game lends itself to one player taking control of the game and forcing people’s actions.

Pandemic is a great introduction to co-op games. As long as your group doesn’t get a player that mandates movement for everybody else, players should have a lot of fun. Unfortunately, players try to mandate turns because they understand the game well and have a good idea of how to win.

Another great aspect of the game is that all players have a character with a unique ability to aid the heroes in curing the earth. This affects each individual player’s strategy to optimize the whole team’s strategy.

Pro:
– Great Co-op that maintains independent play
– Highly replayable
– Lots of expansions to further play
Cons:
– Rules-heavy, making it difficult for new players or learning
– Long play time

Arkham Horror can be a lot of fun and especially with its expansions allows a lot of replayability. There are different ancient ones you can face, one per game. There are numerous monsters that really vary who or what you fight. There are many locations on the board to visit, all with separate effects. The difficulty level is also set well, it is very difficult for newcomers, and while it gets easier as the players are more experienced, it’s still difficult and there are expansions to increase the difficulty.

Pros:
– Enticing strategy
– Nearly limitless deckbuilding opportunities
– Basic rules are easy enough to learn
– Each expansion adds a lot to the game and is significantly different so that the game never feels “old”

Cons:
– An expensive hobby to keep up
– A significant time investment to collect the best cards for your deck and playtest thoroughly for an optimized deck
– Comprehensive rules are so complicated that even game Judges will have difficulty understanding or knowing all of them
– Errata to cards are expected to be known by the players and are only available online. Errata sometimes changes as well.

I love MTG. Magic comes out with 1 base set and 1 block per year. A block is composed of the base set and 2 “expansion sets” with the same theme/storyline. This collectible card game has been around for well over a decade and they still manage to come up with unique cards and even unique abilities.

With so many cards available, the card combinations are endless. There are even multiple tournament styles for players to still use their old cards when they are no longer allowed in “standard” tournament play, which is only the most recent 2 years worth of cards.

Cornucopia is as of this post the latest (but certainly not the last) Dominion expansion. It definitely pushes there being too many Dominion expansions out. But the cards are really fun and very different from previous expansions out there.

One of the most notable cards added is Tournament. This card makes you want to have Provinces in your hand when you play it, as it allows you to acquire one of five new unqiue cards in the game. Even when you don’t have Provinces in your hand, it gives you added benefit when your opponents do not have it in their hand, so it’s still a good early-game buy as well. This is just one of the many fun additions from this expansion.

If you already have the other expansions, I don’t think this is necessary, but if you don’t have many yet, this is one of the funner ones. I think I would recommend it over Alchemy just because it’s more usable with other expansions/base sets than Alchemy is.

The cards in Prosperity cost much more, but also allow you to amass more wealth and points. Two new base cards this set includes are platinum pieces and colonies. In fact, the platinum pile is also small enough that it CAN run out during a game! Platinums cost 9 and are worth 5 coin. Colony cards cost 11 and are worth 9 points. A new rule is that the game also ends when the colony pile is empty.

There are many exciting new cards in this set, especially for those players who love fun, powerful action cards or action-chaining. You’ll see some of your old favorites redesigned to be bigger and more powerful. For instance, King’s Court replaces Throne Room, costing 7 to buy and allowing you to play an action card three times!

When Prosperity came out, I started feeling like Dominion was getting too many expansions released and too close together, but it is still such a fun game to play and one of my favorite expansions to the game.

I love this expansion for what the cards add. The great mechanic that the game adds is a new TYPE of treasure card, potions, which you must purchase in order to purchase many of the alchemy cards. The alchemy cards are very powerful, but this is due to the additional cost, making them slower and more difficult to acquire.

The major downside to this game is that it is not as much fun when you mix all of the Dominion expansions together. You typically end up with 1-2 alchemy cards when you do this, and it makes the worth of purchasing potions decrease so dramatically that it can defeat the purpose of having alchemy cards in the game. Alternatively, this can affect strategy as somebody has to really want the alchemy card(s) in order to buy the potions!

Seaside is a Dominion expansion that includes many new great cards with a seafaring theme, but also a really good mechanic where cards persist for a second turn. These cards give you an initial benefit when you play them, and then an additional benefit the following turn which is up to as good as the first time you play it. It’s like playing a free action card from your deck! This generates many new strategies in how to best manipulate these cards in your deck based on what is out there.

The artwork is still wonderful, and the variety and fun added contributes to an already great game.

One of the great things about Dominion: Intrigue is it can play stand-alone without the base Dominion game, and if you have the base, you can play with up to 6 players! When players get the knack for this game, play will be so quick that you won’t be bogged down by the number of players. But until you get to that point, you should play two games of 3 players each instead of a 6-player game though. The time spent waiting for your turn will slow down the game and make it boring.

Intrigue adds a lot of new cards, increasing the variability in the game, and also adds many more attack cards, giving more use to Moat and the Curses. Amongst my friends, it’s one of the least favored expansions, but I still enjoy many of the twists and unique abilities some of the cards have. The complexity is still low, only slightly more complex than Dominion, so it is still easy for most gamers to learn without problem.

Dominion is a great gateway game that is easy to learn, quick to play, and loads of fun.

Dominion is the first of a series of deckbuilding games where you build your deck as you go. There are a supply of cards to choose from which includes higher currency cards and point cards for scoring at the end of the game. These cards go into your deck to build your deck as you play and give you the competitive edge in the game.

There are numerous cards you could play with, and you only play with a subset of the cards every time, so strategies change every game. Strategies also vary depending on the number of players. The more players there are, the sooner the game ends and the quicker you have to build your deck and start buying points.

The cards in the base game are some of my favorites, but the expansions add a lot more interaction and variability to the game.

In Power Grid you are purchasing power plants and the fuel for them to generate power for your cities. The turn order is based on last place going first, and first place going last, so it encourages players to start out short and end the game with a big bang, but at the same time, building enough to not fall far behind or be forced to pay exorbitant rates for what they’re getting. Also, resources get cheap the more readily available they are, but the more players purchasing a resource, the more expensive it becomes. So again, another reason to go first and even stock up on resources, or build power plants using resources other players don’t want.

As the game progresses, more locations on the map open up for purchase, but also at a higher cost to the players. So you want to be the first in a region to get the lowest cost.

The components are simple, but fun. You have different shapes and colors for each resource, which is much more fun than simply variously colored cubes. The board is well designed. The rules are a little difficult to grasp, but after playing a couple times with an experienced player, are easy enough to understand. All in all, this is a great game to play, it is a lot of fun, and I definitely recommend it.

This is a great tactical game where you are faced usually with a different set of 6 cards in front of you to choose between on each of your turns. Due to the low frequency of cards in the deck, and everybody having accessing to the same pool of cards, it is difficult to create a viable strategy that you don’t have to change frequently. Therefore, this is more a game of tactics than it is a game of strategy. The expansion adds significantly to the strategy, providing more synergy in the factions giving you more reason to focus on one or two factions than the base game does.

As far as the artwork. The art feels really weird to me. Again, I think this has been improved with the expansion, but it doesn’t fit my tastes.

I do like the format of the cards. They don’t feel too busy with information, and learning the game is very easy. The point tokens are a peculiar shape, but fun.

This expansion adds a lot of fun player interaction to carcassonne. The princess castle tiles allow you to remove a knight from an adjoining castle tile. This makes it easier to steal castles from opponents, but adds randomness due to being unsure of if you can keep the castle you worked to build. The other fun addition is the dragon which, whenever a dragon tile appears, players take turns moving the dragon. For each space the dragon lands on, all meeples on that tile are eaten.

Betrayal is one of my favorite games. You are one of six explorers in a haunted house which is constructed as you explore making the house different every game. There are fifty haunts with the option of choosing a different haunt if you end up with one you have previously played. This allows for a lot of replayability in the game with a different experience up to fifty times. The haunt usually places the players in a one versus all scenario.
On the downside, this game has so many possibilities that you will find a few broken mechanics that aren’t accounted for in the rules. You will have to do your best on your own to resolve these issues, but bgg has many threads dedicated to resolving many of them.

I really enjoy this game. It involves some strategy in knowing when to place you meeples and where to place your tiles, especially when trying to steal points from an opponent. The expansions made available help increase the replayability of the game. One of the hardest but most rewarding tactics to understand is how to make the best use of your farmers.