Top 10 games of 2019

Our favorite games that we played in 2019 (not necessarily published this year). As usual we've rated these games based on the amount of time we spent playing them, which should be the best indicator of how entertaining they are.

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10. The Lord of the Rings Trading Card Game

7 plays, 12 hours (average play time 1.71 hours per game)

This excellent game was a staple of our collectible card game diet in the early 2000s, and we started playing it semi-regularly again last year. This year we even bought some new cards (well, published in 2005, but new to us) and we're planning a series of booster draft games over the next few months.

Read the full review.

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9. Mansions of Madness Second Edition

5 plays, 13 hours (average play time 2.6 hours per game)

After showing up at #6 in 2016 and #3 in 2017, Mansions of Madness dropped off our top 10 list last year, most likely due to the number of other miniatures-heavy adventure games we spent time on. It's a great game that plays almost like a light role playing game, with exploration and puzzle-solving taking precedence over tactical movement and combat, and the built-in app taking the place of a game master or villain player.

Read the full review.

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8. Western Legends

5 plays, 13.25 hours (average play time 2.65 hours per game)

Western Legends has turned out to be exactly the game we were hoping it would be: an open world adventure game set in the wild west, where players choose whether to gain fame by being an outlaw, a lawman, a gambler, or, as was quite often true about the game's colorful historical characters, a little of each.

Read the full review.

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7. Marvel Strike Teams

5 plays, 13.25 hours (average play time 2.65 hours per game)

It's too bad that this Marvel Comics miniatures game didn't catch on and isn't likely to see any further development. It had a lot of interesting ideas and concepts that I haven't seen in any other miniatures games, with a strong campaign element and emphasis on character development over multiple games. In this case I think the Heroclix branding did more harm that good, as it really was its own game with very little in common with Heroclix.

Read the full review.

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6. Roll Player

7 plays, 14 hours (average play time 2 hours per game)

We usually come home from GameStorm (Portland's yearly game convention) with a few new games, but they often tend to be impulse buys that we quickly lose interest in. Not so with Roll Player, which is a great combination of tactical dice rolling and fantasy adventure. Who knew a game about creating a D&D character could be this interesting?

Read the full review.

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5. Mythic Battles: Pantheon

10 plays, 20.5 hours (average play time 2.05 hours per game)

Mythic Battles: Pantheon was our most anticipated game in 2017, and it clearly didn't disappoint -- it was our number one most played game in 2018, and its number four spot this year is still respectable. It's a great skirmish/board game hybrid that offers the best of both types of game: a ton of different miniatures, a unique card-based system for activating units and a selection of beautifully illustrated boards that simplify movement and line-of-sight. And with around 80 scenarios offering a change to the normal "move to the middle and fight" brawls that most skirmish games tend to be, it will be a long time before we've exhausted this game's possibilities.

Read the full review.

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4. Conan

12 plays, 20.25 hours (average play time 1.69 hours per game)

This is the fourth year in a row that Conan has made our Top 10. It really is a fantastic adventure game, with a "one vs. many" style of game play that has the structure of a well-designed skirmish game combined with a board game's ease of play and the open-ended flexibility of a role playing game. Unfortunately the game's limited availability and high price point have made it largely inaccessible to a wider market of players, and an upcoming convoluted and confusing Kickstarter campaign doesn't look like it will help matters any.

Read the full review.

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3. Dinogenics

11 plays, 20.5 hours (average play time 1.86 hours per game)

We weren't sure what to expect from this game: how would it compare to Dinosaur Island? Would it be worth having both games? As it turns out, DinoGenics offers a very different play experience, and while the two games have obvious similarities, they are different enough that we can justify owning both. And while its core mechanics aren't all that innovative, DinoGenics has proved to be a little easier to get to the table on a regular basis.

Read the full review.

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2. Dune Collectible Card Game

11 plays, 24 hours (average play time 2.18 hours per game)

Although we were avid collectible card game players during their heyday in the 1990s, Dune somehow passed us by -- we only recently started playing it. It is an old-school CCG through and through, with very complex rules that take a lot of repeat play to master, so this year we decided to commit to playing it regularly. The experience has been a lot of fun, but a little frustrating in that playing the game makes us want to buy more cards (the goal of any CCG), and cards for this one are very difficult to find.

Read the full review.

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1. Star Wars Outer Rim

11 plays, 34.5 hours (average play time 3.14 hours per game)

This game took us by surprise in several ways. We were aware that it was coming but hadn't really planned on getting it. A friend brought it over and after a few games we were hooked, and bought our own copy a few days later. It's a "pick up and deliver" style game similar to Firefly or Wasteland Express Delivery Service, but much easier to set up and play, and of course the Star Wars theme is an easy sell on game night -- we've been able to play this game with several different groups and everyone has enjoyed it immensely. Still, we were a little shocked when it turned out to be our most played game of the year.

Full review to come.

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Honorable Mention

Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game

7 plays, 11.5 hours (average play time 1.64 hours per game)

Legendary: A James Bond Deck Building Game

8 plays, 9.25 hours (average play time 1.15 hours per game)

Although technically you could mix together all the different versions of Legendary, we've never felt the need since each version of the game stands on its own so well, both thematically and technically, so we tend to think of each version as a separate game. If we were to add up the time we spent playing the different versions it would easily have made it into the top 5, and with an ever increasing number of IPs being added to the mix, if there isn't a Legendary game for you yet, there probably will be soon.

Read the full review of Legendary: Marvel.

Full review of Legendary: James Bond to come.

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Most anticipated game of 2020

Judge Dredd: Helter Skelter

As of this writing we just got this game and haven't had a chance to play it yet, but it looks really interesting, with card and movement mechanics similar to Mythic Battles: Pantheon without the sometimes overwhelming amount of content. Plus the game components look to be of extremely high quality. We've been burned on two other Judge Dredd games this year (Judge Dredd: the Cursed Earth was a too-difficult co-op game clearly intended to be played solo, and Judge Dredd: Block War was an unplayable mess), so hopefully the third time will be a charm.

Toy soldiers, part 3: Core Space

When I was a kid Star Wars toys were all the rage. One thing that the developers of the original Star Wars action figures back in the 1970s got absolutely right was that the space ships, vehicles and especially the environments were at least as important as the characters, so they scaled their toy line in such a way that they could include play sets representing locations from the films for kids (and adults) to place the characters in.

Environment is at the heart of Core Space, a game developed by the makers of the Battle Systems line of cardboard miniatures terrain. Their sci-fi series, representing space station corridors, futuristic cities, and planetary outposts, was their most recent (and most successful) product to date, so naturally when they decided to create a game to go with their terrain, it was going to have a space opera theme.

While they could have gone with a standard skirmish game, they opted instead for something with a lot more narrative and adventure to it. Players control crews of scoundrels and pirates in what is essentially a sci-fi dungeon crawl, creeping around in labyrinthine space stations searching for cash and equipment (and yes, the loot is even stored in futuristic treasure chests). While players can opt to attack each others' crews, that would take precious time away from searching for goods and interacting with non-player civilians who might provide useful information or even be persuaded to join the crew.

If it sounds too easy, there's the inevitable catch: the galaxy the game takes place in is under attack from an enigmatic race of killer robots, and a few turns into the game those robots start appearing on the board, their actions controlled by a simple but very effective AI that governs where they move and who they attack. As the game progresses, more advanced (and deadly) models start appearing, and the tension ramps up. The game turns into a "press your luck" situation where you know you should be moving all your crew back to the airlock, but wait, there's a cargo crate we didn't look in yet...

The rules are simple and cinematic, using proprietary dice and an easy measuring system for combat, and there are lots of options for non-combat actions like interacting with civilians, opening and closing doors, using computers and even breaking and jumping through windows. And the fact that the game is designed specifically for the Battle Systems terrain means it gets the most out of it.

The game really shines when played in a series of linked missions over several games, using an experience system that allows crew members to improve their abilities and equipment over the course of the campaign. It even allows for improvements to the crew's space ship, allowing it to do things like scan the station for information or even defend the airlock from off-screen.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) a well designed game with rich, familiar-yet-different characters and a setting that can't help but be fully immersive thanks to the ingenious terrain.

• Core Space official website
• Core Space on BoardGameGeek

Toy soldiers, part 2: Gaslands

Gaslands is another in Osprey Publishing's line of miniatures rule books that exist on their own, without a particular line of miniatures or accessories to go with them. In this case, the game is about post-apocalyptic vehicle combat, so naturally it is designed to be played with Matchbox cars.

The game uses a template-based system for movement (similar to X-Wing) and a rather ingenious way to simulate speed, with cars in higher gear getting to move more often in a turn. The rules are simple and straightforward, aided by an over-arching "rule of carnage" that states that if any rule is unclear or open to multiple interpretations, always go with the option that does the most damage.

The simple rules make it a fast-paced game, which is what you want from a game about speeding cars. Each round is split up into "gear phases" in which cars moving at that gear or higher get to move and then attack (either by ramming or shooting). Going faster gets your vehicle more chances to act, but it also reduces your choice of movement template, which could see your car unexpectedly careening into a bit of terrain, or even off the board all together.

Players are presented with a number of options for creating their cars, including different types of vehicles such as buggies, motorcycles, performance cars, pickup trucks, and even the dreaded War Rig. Cars are then festooned with armaments ranging from basic machine guns to land mines and oil slick sprayers. There is even one faction armed with mad science lighning projectors and EMP pulses, and another that uses jury-rigged catapults to lob bits of junk at their enemies.

While the game is undoubtedly a lot of fun to play, the real joy for most players is in customizing their toy cars, adding machine guns and rams along with dents, scratches, rust and weathering. An entire community has popped up on places like Etsy, providing accessories for players to stick to their toy cars, and in most Gaslands forums there is a lot more discussion about modeling the cars than there is about actually playing the game.

One of my criticisms of Ronin was the lack of accessories such as stat cards, but that's less of an issue with Gaslands, mainly because the game is a lot more popular and there are numerous online resources providing everything from plastic movement templates and custom engraved dice to reusable blank vehicle cards.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) A terrific high-octane vehicle combat game. It may take a bit of prep time if you want to create custom cars to play with, but that really is half the fun (at least).

• Gaslands official website
• Gaslands on BoardGameGeek
• Gaslands Facebook group (very active)

Toy soldiers, part 1: Ronin

Seven samurai, painted and ready to fight!

British publisher Osprey has long been a staple in wargaming circles for their long line of excellent books on military history, covering armies, weapons, and battles throughout history with an eye towards the kind of detail that tabletop miniatures players would want for their games. More recently they've started putting out a series of rule books for miniatures wargaming. For the most part these are stand-alone books that don't come in a box with a bunch of figures, or require the purchase of specific packs of miniatures and accompanying stat cards and tokens. Rather, they are designed to evoke a particular historical period or fictional genre, and the players are free to use whatever miniatures they wish.

Having taken the plunge into miniatures gaming with games like 7TV, Doctor Who: Exterminate!, and Mythic Battles: Pantheon, I wanted to find a samurai themed game to indulge my love of Kurosawa movies, and Ronin: Skirmish Wargames in the age of the Samurai looked like just the thing, although it was another year after buying the rulebook before I got around to buying and painting enough samurai miniatures to play the game with.

After assembling some suitable terrain (mostly of the print-and-play, cut-and-assemble variety) we finally set up to play a game, a simple "defend the bridge" scenario with bloodthirsty bandits on one side and noble Koryu (sword fighting teachers and students) on the other.

The game aims for a "cinematic" style of combat, and does some interesting things that other games of this type don't really do. A game where the majority of the combat will be hand-to-hand could be quite dull -- once the figures have been moved into position, it could quickly devolve into die rolls back and forth, but Ronin opts for something different.

At the start of a hand-to-hand battle, each player secretly chooses a number of tokens based on the experience level of his characters. There are two different tokens to choose from: attack or defense. Once the die rolling starts, these tokens can be spent to improve a character's chance of attacking or defending successfully. What this amounts to is that players are forced to choose whether they want to focus on defense, attack, or try to balance out the two.

As with most games of this type, ranged attackers have the huge advantage of being able to attack from a distance (and in this game they get to attack first), but the game balances that by giving them fewer opportunities to increase their chance of hitting, and it also takes into account the slow reload times of ranged weapons from this time period.

Games are scenario based, usually with a specific goal for one side or the other rather than just "run to the middle and fight," and the game does a good job of allowing for narrative actions like looting bodies and picking up objects. It also has a whole system covering morale and the idea that if the fight is going badly, the troops might start running away.

We really enjoyed the game, and my only complaint isn't really a flaw in the game but an element that could be seen by many as a plus. The game doesn't come with pre-made character cards like its more commercial cousins tend to. Players are given example character types, with options for different weapons and abilities. Character stats are then copied onto a simple roster form for use during play. It works fine and is well suited to this style of game, but at the same time (and this is a very superficial criticism) it's an element of the game that is dry and uninteresting. Additionally, the hand writing and pre-game decision making makes it more difficult to just jump in and start playing, which means we won't get this game to the table very often.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) A great game system that works fine as-is, but could benefit from some more lavish support materials and a shorter prep time.

• Ronin: Skirmish Wargames in the Age of the Samurai official website
• Ronin: Skirmish Wargames in the Age of the Samurai on BoardGameGeek

Sometimes great artwork is enough

Imperius caught my attention entirely due to its striking artwork, which crisply illustrates a far-future interstellar empire (clearly based on Frank Herbert's Dune) where great houses vie for power through a combination of two-faced intrigue and raw military might.

Each player is given an assortments of cards in their color, representing characters such as nobles, bodyguards, and assassins. All the players' cards are shuffled together (along with a handful of event cards) and then redistributed by means of a card draft: each player is dealt a hand of 5 cards, keeping one and passing the rest to the next player until all the cards have been drafted. The strategy here is to balance taking cards you know you want with keeping powerful cards out of the hands of your opponents.

The thing that makes drafting a little different in this game is that you're not just drafting cards from your own faction. You're also looking at which of your opponents' cards you would prefer to have some control over; for example, if you want to make good use of your Noble, you may want to also draft your opponent's Assassin in order to keep it from interfering with your plans (more on how the cards interact in a moment).

Once players have drafted their cards for the round, they take turns playing them to various different location cards at the center of the board. Two cards can go to each location face down, but once that limit is reached, remaining cards are played face up, so you have to choose carefully which cards you want to keep a secret and which ones you don't mind your opponents knowing about. After everyone has deployed their cards, the cards that have been played to each location are revealed and resolved in a pre-determined order (not necessarily the order they were played in).

As cards are resolved, Assassins kill Nobles, Royal Guards protect Nobles from getting killed, Ambassadors and Nobles (if they survived the Assassin) score victory points, and Commanders place control points on locations, which in turn score points at the end of the game. Each character has a rating in strength and favor, which are used to determine who wins if, for example, two different players have their Noble at the same location.

What makes this really interesting is that you aren't always playing your own characters, so you might play an opponent's Ambassador to a planet that isn't worth many points, in order to keep him out of your way, or you may even be able to play one opponent's Assassin against another opponent's Noble, paving the way for you to sneak the location's victory points out from under them.

The game play describes a lot of dramatic intrigue. It might be a little bit more interesting if the game took place in a world that we knew more about, such as the aforementioned Dune or even Star Wars, but the evocative artwork paints a detailed picture of an interstellar setting that seems a lot deeper than it is.

Rating: 4 (out of 5): Imperius has some unusual concepts that can be a struggle to explain to new players, but once everyone understands the basic strategy it's a compelling mid-weight game with simple mechanics but a lot of depth.

• Imperius official website
• Imperius on BoardGameGeek

Character developments

When you say it out loud, a whole board game about creating a D&D style fantasy character sounds silly. But how different is it from games where you're trying to build a western town, an expedition journal, or a space empire? And besides, there are many that would argue that building and developing your character is the most compelling part of playing Dungeons & Dragons, or indeed almost any role playing game.

Roll Player had intrigued me for some time, but it's done by a small publisher who primarily uses Kickstarter so availability has been spotty since it came out in 2016. I finally got a chance to play it at a convention earlier this year, and was instantly hooked, so much so that I bought a copy right then and there.

The game features a game board for each player denoting one of the standard fantasy races such as elf, dwarf, or halfling, plus a few more esoteric choices like minotaur or cat person. From there players are dealt a random set of character class cards from which they choose their profession, a backstory, and an alignment.

Game play revolves around randomly choosing 6-sided dice from a bag, rolling them, and then taking turns choosing which ones to add to the different statistics on your character sheet. The number rolled on the dice is important, but so is the color -- your profession tells you what range of numbers you want, and your back story (as well as other factors) tell you what color and where on the sheet you want to place them.

After dice are chosen, players choose from a row of equipment cards which further enhance their characters, with specific equipment and skills being more or less suited to specific types of characters. Among the choices are skill cards that adjust your character's alignment (their moral compass) when used, as well as trait cards that give a point bonus at the end of the game.

These two phases are repeated 12 times, at which time all the players will have a full player board. Points are awarded based on how well optimized the character is, with bonus points for placing the the right colors of dice in the right places on your sheet, acquiring equipment and traits best suited to your character, and getting your alignment marker placed in a way that suits your alignment card.

It's a well-designed engine-building game, and I find it a bit more compelling than empire-building games like Race for the Galaxy because I'm building and individual character and equipping him (or her) for adventure, rather than a more abstract empire of planets and starships. An expansion adds the ability to fight minor monsters, building up experience in order to face off against a big bad at the end of the game, but honestly I find that addition a little distracting; I would rather just spend time building my character.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) a terrific game that's compelling but reasonably simple to play and not overly competitive, making it a great choice for a casual game night.

• Roll Player official website
• Roll Player on BoardGameGeek

There's a dinosaur cloning game for everyone

Crowdfunding, pre-orders and limited print runs are rapidly becoming the standard for game publishing, and it is because of this that I had to decide whether I wanted DinoGenics before I was able to play Dinosaur Island. Based only on information from their respective crowdfunding campaigns the two games look very similar, and honestly, how many dinosaur cloning games does one person need?

If I'd been looking at both games at the same time I most likely would have only chosen one, and that one would have been DinoGenics, based on its more conventional illustrations and graphic design -- the obnoxious look of Dinosaur Island remains one of the few things I don't like about the game. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) I had to make a decision on DinoGenics after I had committed to buying Dinosaur Island, so I ended up with copies of both games. In the end I'm glad I did.

The two games are similar in that they are both worker placement games about building a zoo filled with cloned dinosaurs, but that's where the similarity ends. DinoGenics is a much more traditional worker placement game, with players competing for spaces on the board so they can get the resources they need to clone dinosaurs, build appropriate enclosures for them, and add enough support buildings to accommodate an increasing number of guests. And don't forget to feed those carnivores, or they'll break out of their enclosures and you'll likely spend a lot of your next turn making repairs...

The game design is solid if not overly innovative, but where DinoGenics really shines in in the quality of its components. The graphic design is excellent and does a much better job of evoking Jurassic Park than the much more stylized Dinosaur Island. The meeples are wood rather than plastic (in my opinion plastic meeples are a disturbing trend in game publishing and a scourge upon mankind), done in very nice greens, browns and greys that make it easy to tell the different types of dinosaurs apart. The cards and tiles are sturdy with high quality printing -- the only thing I don't like is that some of the text on the building tiles is very small and difficult to read.

If I had to choose between DinoGenics and Dinosaur Island, I would probably choose DinoGenics, although I do think the game play in Dinosaur Island is a bit more innovative. In the end the games are different enough that I'm happy to have both in my collection.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) This game features more traditional worker placement style game play than its competitor, but the much more lavish graphic design more than makes up for it.

• DinoGenics official website
• DinoGenics on BoardGameGeek

Into the tiny

Tiny Epic Galaxies delivers on its promise: it has the feel of an epic exploration game, but it comes in a small box and doesn't take all day to play. Now, don't get me wrong, it isn't Xia or Star Wars Rebellion, but it still creates a sense of mighty space empires growing stronger as they explore and conquer new territory.

It's a dice placement game, a growing sub-genre of worker placement where players roll dice to determine what actions they can do in a given round. The actions here are moving a space ship between planets, acquiring one of the game's two resources (energy or culture), using either diplomacy or economy to advance colonization efforts on a planet, or utilizing an established colony's special ability for a game effect.

Players start with 4 dice and two space ships, and compete to exploit the resources of a row of planet cards at the center of the table. Landing on a planet conveys a one-time use of that planet's special ability. Orbiting the planet and taking the time to colonize it takes longer but adds the planet to your pool of colonies, meaning only you may use its special ability. Additionally, each planet provides either energy or culture, so spreading out your ships to take the best advantage of the acquire resource action is critical to having the resources you need to upgrade your empire, which gets you more ships and dice to use on later turns.

As with all the games in the Tiny Epic series, this one doesn't really offer anything truly original, but that's not the point. The accomplishment is that it offers something similar to what you normally only get from much larger and more time-consuming games. The amount of game that designer Scott Almes is able to get out of a minimum of components is astonishing.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) There's a lot more going on in this game than can be expected from a 5" x 7" box, that's for sure.

• Tiny Epic Galaxies official website
• Tiny Epic Galaxies on BoardGameGeek

Idle meeples are the devil's tool

There are a ridiculous number of worker placement games out there, so it's unusual when one comes along that has something innovative about it.

Most worker placement games follow the same basic pattern: players are given a number of workers (usually four or five) and take turns placing them on spots on the board that give the player game advantages or resources. Once every player has placed all their workers, the board is cleared, the workers are reclaimed, and a new round of placement begins.

Architects of the West Kingdom, designed by Shem Phillips (of Raiders of the North Sea fame) does things a little differently. While unmistakably a worker placement game, with a lot of the same game elements (placing workers to achieve game effects), Architects does away with the round structure, instead making reclaiming workers one of the available actions in the game.

It may seem like a small thing, but its a huge shift in the way worker placement games are played. In addition to the normal concerns of gathering resources and spending them to put building cards into play, players must now look at their available pool of workers, and when it's the best time to either reclaim their workers from the board, or from the prison space where they can sometimes end up.

The prison space helps the players cultivate a sense of urgency. Various game effects will send your workers to prison, and at certain points during the game, whoever has the most imprisoned workers has to take a debt card, which causes point loss if it isn't paid off by the end of the game.

This brings us to the other interesting thing about Architects: the idea of virtue. The game board includes a virtue track that players will move up and down on, depending on their actions during the game. Being low on the virtue track has certain advantages (such as not having to pay taxes, which makes a lot of the in-game purchases cheaper), but also causes a loss of points at the end of the game. So manipulating your position on the track to your best advantages adds another strategic layer of the game.

It's a terrific game with a lot going on in spite of the relatively simple rules, with several different paths to victory and quite a bit more interaction between players than you normally see in games of this type.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) Shem Phillips knocks it out of the park again. Anyone who likes worker placement games should love this one.

• Architects of the West Kingdom official website
• Architects of the West Kingdom on BoardGameGeek

Space tourists

Space Park is the type of game that tends to appeal to me right away: great looking illustration and graphic design, at a low enough price point that I can afford to take a chance and buy the game on impulse. These impulse purchases can be a mixed bag, sometimes resulting in great looking games whose novelty wears off quickly (Grimslingers), or games that sounded more interesting than they actually are (Deadline), but every once in a while we end up with an entertaining game that, while simple, bears out repeated plays and earns a place in our collection.

First let's talk about the artwork. The game board is made up of a series of large tiles, each intended to look like a tourism advertisement for a location in outer space. The illustrations are gorgeous: any one of them would look great at poster size, framed on a wall somewhere. The rest of the game's printed components use snippets from these pieces of artwork along with some considered and sophisticated typography and graphic design.

Okay, so the game is pretty, but is it any fun to play? Yes it is. Space Park is an interesting marriage of familiar game mechanics with a few unusual ideas. At its core it's a resource collection game: players move around on a board made up of the aforementioned tiles, each representing a location where various different resources can be picked up, exchanged, or spent in various combinations to purchase victory points and game advantages.

What sets the game apart is the way players move around the board. Regardless of the number of players, there are three silver rocket ships, each starting at a different location. On a player's turn, they perform the action at a location where there is a ship (usually collecting a resource), then move that ship to the next empty location. This is interesting for several reasons, the most obvious being that each player doesn't have their own playing piece, they always have a choice of three pieces to move. More strategically, it means that every time a player takes their turn, they need to think about where the piece will be moving and what advantage they're giving the next player by moving it there.

It's one of those rare games with simple rules but a lot to think about that's great for when you want a lighter game with a reasonable amount of strategic depth. And it's very pretty to look at.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) Not necessarily an immersive "play all day" type game, but excellent for what it is: lightweight and fun.

• Space Park official website
• Space Park on Boardgamegeek

We need more information

The story behind CIA: Collect it All is a fascinating one. Last year several games designed by the CIA for use as training simulations were declassified by the U. S. government. Since they were designed by a government employee in the course of his work they are automatically in the public domain in the U. S., so an enterprising game publisher got to work designing a commercial version which was funded using Kickstarter and delivered to backers in December of 2018.

The game uses cards to represent intelligence collection techniques such as media analysis, satellite imaging, and data hacking. Players use those cards to solve global crises like foreign missile testing or election interference, by matching the correct types of intelligence to the crises they will be effective against. Opponents can interfere by playing "reality check" cards which represent the idea that nothing ever goes as planned.

As a training tool, an important part of the game was the inclusion of "manager challenge" cards, which forced the CIA trainees to justify the plays they made, explaining how, for example, "document and media exploitation" would be effective against "European crime and corruption" in the real world. These are included in the game as an optional variant, but the rules suggest only using them if all the players have a "firm understanding of intelligence techniques."

In theory the idea of this game is very compelling, but without the manager challenge cards, it's really just a symbol matching game, with each player trying to match the symbols on their collection cards to the ones on the crisis cards. It might have worked a lot better if there were more background information on the cards, to give players more information they could use to at least bluff their way through a manager challenge. I think the designers really missed an opportunity to create a game that would be informational and intellectually stimulating as well as entertaining.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) not a terrible game but a huge missed opportunity.

• CIA: Collect it All official website
• CIA: Collect it All on BoardGameGeek

Superhero dungeon crawl

On first glance, Marvel Strike Teams looks like another variant in Wizkids' Heroclix line of games. It has many similarities, both thematic and mechanical, but a number of differences that make it an interesting game in its own right.

Like Heroclix, Marvel Strike Teams is a tactical superhero battle game. It uses a grid system for movement and range, and characters find their powers and abilities decreasing in effectiveness as they take on damage, which is a hallmark of the Heroclix system.

Unlike Heroclix, Strike Teams is a one vs. many style game, with one player taking on the role of a supervillain and his minions, and the others each controlling a single hero and working cooperatively to foil the villain's dastardly plans. It's also much more mission oriented, with victory centered on accomplishing certain in-game goals (such as rescuing hostages or finding macguffins rather than just trying to obliterate your opponent's forces. In spite of the superhero theme, the game structure is that of a classic "dungeon crawl," with heroes creeping through rooms and corridors in search of treasure and a quick exit.

The game is designed to be played campaign style over multiple game sessions, with both the heroes and the villains gaining experience and improving their abilities between games, another thing that sets it apart from the one-off battles of Heroclix and makes it seem more like a D&D-style dungeon crawler.

But the really innovative thing about Strike Teams is that it uses a diceless system for combat. Players instead use resource management and damage control to accomplish their side's goals during the game.

Each round, characters are given a certain number of action points, which can be spent to move, heal damage, use special powers, and most importantly, attack and defend. Action points can be saved up from round to round (up to a pre-set maximum), so game play is a balancing act between moving, attacking, and saving aside points to defend your character against attacks.

It's very different from most battle games (including Heroclix), which use random dice rolls to determine the outcome of combat. Sure, most of those games will include game mechanics to mitigate the randomness such as rerolls, bonuses, and extra dice, but there is always the chance that an attack will go badly due to random chance that is outside the player's control.

Monolith's Conan game is probably a closer comparison in terms of the level of strategic resource management and focus on scenario goals over outright fighting, but even it uses dice to resolve combat.

With only a handful of characters to choose from in the base game an one small expansion, Strike Teams lacks the epic scope of what Heroclix can offer with its thousands of different figures over multiple franchises. It's a pity there aren't more expansions planned for Strike Teams, because mechanically it's a much more interesting game.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A terrific alternative to battle games like Heroclix, but unfortunately its lack of commercial success will limit this game to only a handful of characters and limited replayability.

• Marvel Strike Teams official website
• Marvel Strike Teams on BoardGameGeek

A disease of invaders

Pandemic has taken Settlers of Catan's place as the foremost gateway into hobby gaming, and with its simple yet challenging design, engaging cooperative theme, and deep market penetration, it's earned it. In an effort to get the game to even more tables, Pandemic's publisher has re-skinned the game in a plethora of different flavors, changing the threat to a flood in Rising Tide or Lovecraftian horrors in Pandemic Cthulhu.

We've only played Pandemic once or twice, and never got around to buying a copy for our game library, so we decided to pick up the Fall of Rome version, which replaces spreading disease vectors with invading armies of barbarians intent on sacking ancient Rome. Since we have little experience with the original Pandemic we can't really compare the two, but that might be better as we can look at this version of the game on its own merits.

It's easy to see why Pandemic has been such a successful game. The rules are simple but allow for a good amount of meaningful decision making, and watching the board fill up with counters representing the barbarian hordes gives the game a great sense of drama. Players can command Roman legions to fight off the barbarians, but the real strategy is in collecting sets of cards that can be turned in to make peace with individual barbarian tribes. This doesn't stop them from attacking, but it makes it possible to convert barbarians into Roman soldiers to help fight off their former allies.

Players are also given a handful of special cards that offer great advantages in the game, but at a price. Each time one of these cards is spent for its more powerful effect, it moves the decline marker closer to the eventual collapse of Roman society from within, which gives the game another clock to race against.

The engaging game play is coupled with some terrific artwork that helps sell the idea that these are cultured Roman citizens fighting off invading armies and their own decline, rather than just colored cubes on a piece of cardboard.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A robust and well-designed game that we will play often, and it's usually an easy sell to our non-gamer friends and family too.

• Pandemic: Fall of Rome official website
• Pandemic: Fall of Rome on BoardGameGeek

A pirate's life, maybe not for me

We've had Tortuga 1667 for nearly a year, and we've only played it twice. That's not entirely uncommon given how many games we have, but I find myself wondering why we haven't gotten it to the table more often.

A big part of it is that Tortuga 1667 wants to be a social deduction game, a genre of game that generally requires a large number of players to be interesting, and most of our non-RPG gaming tends to be done in groups of 2-4 players. Plus I don't really like social deduction games. I find them to be too abstract and lacking in interesting game mechanics or compelling adventure, the two things I tend to look for in a game.

So how did we end up with this game in the first place? Well, it is absolutely beautiful too look at, and it was offered as an add-on in Facade Games' Kickstarter campaign for Deadwood 1876. Plus the player official player count is 2-9, so we figured we might be able to make it work for smaller groups.

At the start of the game, each player is given a secret affiliation, either French or English. The game then involves jockeying for the positions on the board that allow you to either move the other players around, or allocate treasure chests to one side or the other. The trick is that you don't know which players are on your side, and every part of the game relies on anticipating whether or not you think the other players will help or hinder you.

For example, a player in the Captain position can call for an attack, which adds more treasure to his ship. But the attack is resolved by each whose pawn is currently on that ship secretly playing a card that will either help or hinder the attack, so an attack will only be successful if the majority of players on the ship think the Captain is on their side.

In our games we found that, due to this voting mechanic, it was very difficult for a player to actually accomplish anything on their turn. Attacks would get voted down, treasure would get moved back and forth, and the social deduction part of the game wasn't very interesting, and more aggravating than fun.

It's possible that this game just needs more players than we normally have on hand (we played one game with 3 and one with 5), but honestly, if we ever have a table of 6 or more players we're more likely to play a meatier game like Battlestar Galactica, which makes more interesting use of the "secret betrayer" idea, or Dune, which allows players to decide how much "shifting alliances" they want in the game.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) This game just isn't compelling enough at low player counts, and not worth the effort of getting a large group together.

• Tortuga 1667 official website
• Tortuga 1667 on BoardGameGeek

Small things come in good packages

I was drawn to the Kickstarter campaign for Deadwood 1876 by its terrific artwork and simple, elegant graphic design, so let's talk about that first.

It is a great looking game. It comes packaged (like all of the games in the "dark city" series from Facade Games) in a box designed to look like an old leather bound book with a magnetic lid. All the game components other than the cards are made of wood (no plastic) and beautifully designed, especially the three engraved discs that represent the locations in the game. The artwork on the cards is very well-rendered, in a style that is just cartoony enough to be expressive but without looking silly.

The game's design is also very minimal, which appeals to me as a respite from the current trend towards overproduced Kickstarter games with hundreds of plastic miniatures and overdone, hard to read boards and rulebooks. Finally something simple and (hopefully) easy to play.

Or is it?

The rules and mechanics of the game are simple enough. The game consists of Safe cards, Deadwood cards, and three locations at the center of the table. Each player starts with two face down safe cards in front of them, and there is a stack of three more in the center; Safe cards consist mainly of gold in various denominations, with a few guns and other items sprinkled in.

Players also start with a hand of Deadwood cards that represent items used to perform actions: guns for fighting, horses for movement, and various bits of leatherwork such as hats and holsters for manipulating the cards in various ways. Player pawns are randomly distributed among the three locations (more on this in a moment).

The goal of the game is to be in the location whose occupants collectively have the most gold (depicted on their face down Safe cards) at the end of the game. Once the winning location has been determined, the occupants of that location use their remaining weapon cards to fight it out to see who the final winner is.

Play consists of each player playing one Deadwood card from their hand. A card can be played as a weapon to attack another player, in order to either take one of their safes, or to switch places with another player's pawn or force them to leave your location. Weapons have variable strengths but use dice to determine the outcome of combat, so a lower card isn't necessarily a lost cause. Or, it can be played for another effect such as moving between locations (if there's room, each location is limited to a certain number of player pawns), peeking at face down Safe cards, or drawing extra Deadwood cards from the deck.

After each player has had a turn to play a card, there is a heist round, where players use weapon cards to fight it out for one of the safes in the middle of the table. Then another round of play begins, and so on, until all the safes in the center have been claimed. At that point there is one final round, and then the winning location is determined and the final showdown happens.

It sounds like there's a lot going on, and there is, but there is one critical problem. A key strategy to the game is figuring out who has the high value safes, so you can either steal them or make sure you're at the location with the most gold at the end. It's supposed to be a "game of shifting alliances" where you side with the others in your location to make sure you collectively have the most gold, and then backstab them in the final showdown. The problem is that with only four turns per player before the final showdown, you just don't have enough time for the amount of social deduction or level of strategy that the game calls for.

Because of the amount of bluffing and secret information involved, the game relies on all the players having a roughly equal understanding of the rules and especially the strategy, which makes it very difficult to teach. This is a major problem for a game that, like any "shifting alliances" game, needs a large number of players to be interesting.

On the other hand, I think there is a fun game here somewhere, and the gorgeous design and components make me want to keep trying to make it work.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) Too much social deduction for a board game, or perhaps too much structure for a social deduction game, but the game is beautiful to look at.

• Deadwood 1876 official website
• Deadwood 1876 on Board Game Geek

Going your own route

“Leave me alone and let me go to hell by my own route.” 

– "Calamity" Jane Cannary, shortly before her death in Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1903. 

I love open world adventure games like Runebound, Fortune and Glory, and the mother of them all, Talisman. I also love the historical western genre, and have often found myself wishing, "if only there were a wild west version of Talisman..."

Well, now there is. Western Legends took Kickstarter by storm last year, billing itself as a wild west sandbox board game, and for the most part it delivers on that promise.

Players take on the roles of legendary historical figures such as Doc Holliday, Calamity Jane, Billy the Kid, or even lesser known characters like Bass Reeves or Y. B. Rowdy (this game does a better job than most at equal representation, with nearly half of the playable characters being women or people of color). The object of the game is to roam the countryside earning "Legendary Points" towards a goal determined by the length of game the players decide on at the start.

Players can earn points by prospecting for gold or herding cattle, but the real meat of the game is in the decision to either follow a path of law and order as a Marshal, or become a Wanted outlaw. Marshals spend the game tracking down non-player bandits as well as players who have gone renegade, facing off in combat via a clever poker-based game mechanic. Outlaws can choose to rob the bank, steal cattle, but have to watch out for player Marshals as well as a non-player Sheriff, because getting caught will force them to pay a hefty fine and set them back to the start of the outlaw track. Players can even switch careers midway through the game -- you aren't locked into a single course of action and can switch gears as needed.

The problem with a lot of open world games is that it's often difficult for players to figure out what they should be doing. Western Legends deals with this through several goal-oriented game mechanics. First of all, each player character comes with a set of goal cards outlining fairly simple tasks to perform such as winning fights or rustling cattle. There is also a story deck, which rewards players who achieve certain goals with bonus points or equipment as well as a bit of back story.

If I have any problem with Western Legends it's that it doesn't really shine at lower player counts. Playing the game with two requires the use of a third character, the Man in Black, whose actions are determined by a random set of cards. It works, but the game is a lot more fun with a full table of 4-5 players so Marshals have plenty of outlaws to chase, and outlaws have plenty of other outlaws to distract the Marshal...

Rating: 5 (out of 5) a terrific game that does exactly what it set out to do, which is to provide open-ended board game adventures in the wild west.

• Western Legends official website
• Western Legends on Board Game Geek

We could be heroes

There are a vast number of games based on pre-existing film, television and literary properties. The most successful tend to have distinctive settings with large casts of characters, such as Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, but what about the more character-driven franchises, where the action tends to be led by a single hero through multiple adventures? There is always going to be a problem answering the question "who gets to play the hero?"

Age of Conan solves this problem by having players bid for the right to have Conan lead their armies, while the short lived Conan Collectible Card Game just lets every player have their own version of the Cimmerian hero when it's their turn, and Monolith's Conan adventure game balances Conan against a wide variety of arguably more interesting playable characters. Planet of the Apes divides lead character Taylor into four separate psychological aspects (with only limited success).

The designers of Samurai Jack: Back to the Past, based on the Cartoon Network animated television series, faced a similar design problem, and they found an ingenious solution. Players take on the roles of various colorful characters Jack meets along his journey, while Jack himself is a non-player character who adds an interesting layer of complexity to what would otherwise be a simple "race to the finish" game.

The game board consists of a trail of tiles representing different types of locations such as jungle, fields, or desert. Players play Movement cards to move along the trail, collecting Support cards along the way which will be spent at the end of the trail to fight one of several villains. The better your specific combination of Support cards, the more points you'll earn from the villain, so a lot of the game is looking at which cards are available at which locations, and planning your moves in order to beat your opponents to the cards you need for the most points when facing the villain.

This alone might be an okay game (if a little simple), but in addition to the player pieces, there are two non-player characters moving along the path, Samurai Jack and his nemesis Aku. Jack moves along the path first, his movement determined by drawing a random card. Then the players all move, and finally Aku moves using another random card. A separate board keeps track of Jack's sanity, and if he is on a tile by himself or with Aku, he moves a step closer to madness. If his madness tracker gets all the way to the end, all the players lose the game, so in addition to gathering the cards they need to win, players have to keep an eye on Jack, and occasionally come to his rescue.

The game manages to combine several different mechanical elements without any of them seeming out of place, and the graphic design and game components are miles ahead of what I would expect for a relatively inexpensive game like this: full color plastic miniatures, what looks like original illustrations rather than just screen captures from the show, and a sharp design sense overall. It all comes together to make a game that, while fairly simple, is entertaining to play and very true to its source material.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) a little on the simple side, but nevertheless an excellent, well-crafted game.

• Samurai Jack: Back to the Past official website
• Samurai Jack: Back to the Past on Board Game Geek

Running and screaming

"Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that's how it always starts. Then later there's running and screaming."

-- Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), The Lost World: Jurassic Park

In the past few years there have been several great games such as Dinosaur Island and DinoGenics that were clearly inspired by the Jurassic Park franchise. Interestingly, those games are about building a successful, functioning dinosaur zoo, the one thing that doesn't happen in any of the films; they're always about the dinosaurs escaping and causing chaos. I guess it takes a legitimately licensed game like Jurassic Park Danger! to really understand what the franchise is all about.

It's a one vs. many game based on the first film in the series, where one player takes control of the escaped carnivorous dinosaurs while the others play as a selection of the humans trying to make their way through the malfunctioning park to the helicopter pad and escape.

Each human character has a unique deck of cards giving that player general options such as moving and hiding as well as a few that are specific to each character, such as Ray Arnold's "hold on to your butts" that allows him to turn the electric fences back on, or little Timmy's encyclopedic knowledge of dinosaur behavior. Human players have to carefully manage their cards, choosing the best moments to play certain cards; if a human player ever runs out of cards, their character is eliminated and removed from the game (but not to fear, that player gets a new character to play).

In addition to avoiding the wily dinosaurs, the human characters each have a goal they must accomplish before they can head for the helicopter pad. Most of them just have to go to a specific location to collect their goal token, but some have to perform a specific task: Muldoon the game warden has to distract the Velociraptor, for example. Sneaky Dennis Nedry starts play with his goal token already collected, so all he has to do is make a beeline for the chopper, but he's more likely to be attacked by a dinosaur than the other characters.

The dinosaur player's goal is simple: eat a certain number of humans before they can escape. The dinosaurs move via a deck of cards similar to what the humans have, and each dinosaur has a special ability that they can't use every turn, so their player has to employ some strategy to get the most out of each dinosaur.

With cardboard components and wooden meeples instead of sculpted miniatures, Jurassic Park Danger! has clearly been designed for mass market sale. In an industry that seems increasingly interested in marketing expensive, overproduced, made-to-order games for a small market of mail order consumers (a trend I'm as guilty of supporting as anyone), it's nice to see a cheap, accessible game that's a lot more interesting than we usually see in licensed mass market products.

It's not going to change your life or anything, but it's fun and simple and evokes the source material very well. This might be a good entry level game for younger gamers, people new to the hobby, or even for your regular gaming group if they need a break from Gloomhaven...

Rating: 3 (out of 5) not quite in the same league as most hobby board games, but close, and definitely worth the low price.

• Jurassic Park Danger! official website
• Jurassic Park Danger! on Board Game Geek

Teeming with life

Exoplanets is a fairly simple tile placement game in which players score points by placing and advancing life on the planets with the most advantageous location within the solar system. Play consists of drawing tiles that represent new planets and placing them in one of four rows that extend outward from the central "sun." Where a tile is placed helps determine what resources a player gains from placing the tile; each tile gives its own resource, and also gains one from the tile it is placed next to.

Resources are then used to add life to planets. The cost is determined by the type of planet, and these costs can be modified by "space tiles" that players pick up when placing new planets. Additionally, a space tile played in this manner will often affect other nearby planets, either in the same row or the same "orbit," the corresponding position in the other three rows. This is where the game steers away from the standard engine-building and lack of player interaction that is characteristic of most eurogames, as a well-placed space tile can often force a player to change where they're placing their life tokens.

Life tokens are gradually piled up onto a planet until one player has four, at which point they are exchanged for a species token. At this point all the other players' life tokens are removed from that planet, which adds to the games strategy -- will you try to race with the other players to see who can add life more quickly to the easier planets (the ones that require fewer resources to play on), or will you take your time to build on a more difficult planet in order to avoid the competition?

The game ends when the last energy resource is taken from the center of the board, which is normally also when the last empty spot is filled with a planet tile. At that point players score based on how much life they've put into play, with modifiers for placing life on planets with more difficult requirements.

I like this game because it's managed to put together some fairly familiar game mechanics (tile placement, resource collection, area control) in a unique way. I can't point to any other games that it has much in common with. On top of that the rules come with several variants to keep game play from getting stale, and there's an expansion that adds new space tiles, different types of central stars, and a gravity well that allows players to change around the types of energy they have to spend.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A neat game with some unique game mechanics and simple, clear graphic design.

• Exoplanets official website
• Exoplanets on Board Game Geek

Crime pays, as long as you don't get caught

Burgle Bros. is an entertaining and well-designed game about robbing an office building. Players take on the roles of a colorful cast of criminals (I'm sure they're well-meaning) and work together to find a hidden safe on each of three floors of the building, and then escape to the roof. If anyone is caught by a wandering guard, the whole team loses the game.

Each floor of the building is represented by a 4x4 grid of face down tiles. Players reveal them by moving onto them, or they can play it safe by spending extra movement to peek ahead at an adjacent tile before moving. Movement between tiles is somewhat hampered by wall pieces that are placed between certain tiles (depending on the game setup). The tiles represent different locations in the building, some helpful and some not. Alarms can be tripped, computer rooms can be hacked, but the ultimate goal for each floor is to find two tiles: the safe, and the stairs to the next level.

Once the safe is found, the combination needs to be cracked by rolling dice and matching the numbers to those printed on the tiles in the same row an column as the safe (so even if you get lucky and find the safe and the stairs right away, you still need to explore at least some of the other tiles). The player who opens the safe draws a loot card, which will most likely do something to make movement more difficult, and a tool card, which generally gives a helpful ability.

Lest this all seem too easy, each floor has a wandering guard and a deck of cards that randomly determines his destination. The guard takes the shortest path to his destination tile, then draws another destination and continues moving. If a guard moves onto a player's tile (or vice versa), the player has to discard a stealth token or be caught! Players start the game with three tokens, and once they're gone, if the guard catches you again the whole team loses the game.

It's as much a puzzle as it is a game, with the primary strategy being how to move around the tiles without being caught by the guard. Some tiles set off an alarm when you move on to them, which can be used tactically to change the direction the guard is moving (when an alarm goes off, the guard immediately changes his destination to the tile with the alarm). The characters chosen by the players each have a unique ability as well -- some can move through guards or slow them down.

The graphic design and artwork have a refreshing retro 1960s look, and the "crime caper" theme makes for a nice change from fighting orcs or being driven mad by Lovecraftian horrors.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) You know it's a good cooperative game when after you lose you immediately start talking about what you could have done differently, and then set up to play again.

• Burgle Bros. Official Website
• Burgle Bros. on BoardGameGeek