Favorite Game for December 16th

#9 Harmonies

In Harmonies players draft chonky wooden disks to create a habitat for animals to live. (It's a bit like Cascadia, but the drafting reminds me of Azul.) You score points for creating habitats appropriate to specific animals, and just for grouping your land features in certain ways. 

On your turn, you select a group of 3 disks/tiles and then you must place them. This can be tricky, because you might get a tile that won't be placed for you in an optimal way, but you still have to find somewhere to put it.

You may also choose an animal card, if you don't have four already. Be careful though, these cards stay with you until you complete them. The animal cards have spaces to store a few cubes. You can remove a cube from the card and place it into the habitats that you are creating if they meet that animal's requirements. Once all cubes are placed, the card is complete and it frees up space for a new card. 

This puzzle of building the terrains and then creating the habitats for the animals is really breezy and fun. You're just creating patterns with the disks and putting cubes on them. But, because of the application of the theme to both the disks and the animal cards everything is intuitive. Julie and I were up and playing in minutes. The game is quick to learn, quick to set up, and quick to play. But, then oh so thinky! It's awesome!!

Favorite Game for December 15th

#10 Call to Adventure

In Call to Adventure players draft beautifully illustrated Tarot-sized cards in order to create a chronicle of a heroic (or villainous) adventurer. Cards must be won by casting runes to claim them. There is a basic set of three runes that show a single slash mark on one side and are blank on the other, except for one that shows a special symbol on one side in place of the slash mark. That symbol allows players to draw a card. The slash mark represents a success.

The special symbol allows players to draw a hero or antihero card. These are cards that give one off benefits. There are heroic effects on the hero cards and usually more negative effects to attack your opponents on the antihero cards. Which cards you can and should choose to draw will depend on if you are creating a story that follows a light or dark path.

At most, the basic runes can increase your total results during a casting by +2, but there is also a set of three dark runes. The dark runes all show a moon on one side and a slash mark on the other. The slash is a success, and the moon is two successes! So, choosing dark runes is guaranteed to improve your chances, but for every moon you roll, you gain a bit of darkness.

Every player board has a track for light and darkness – good and evil. Characters start in the middle but can move in either direction. Both score points at the end of the game. The light side scores more, but as described above, because of the dark runes, the dark side is easier.

Casting runes to win cards adds them to your story chronicle. Many of these cards will have tests on them showing their difficulty, indicating how many successes are required to claim the card. They will also include symbols on them representing one of six traits. The six traits are: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Players of Dungeons and Dragons will recognize these traits, and they work the same way here.

A chronicle card describing leading a strategic battle might display the symbols of strength and intelligence or charisma on it. If you win that card, you gain the runes that match the symbols on that card and the symbols on other cards you add to your chronicle as well. The runes that you gain from cards in your chronicle are advanced runes.

Advanced runes show a slash mark on one side and a special symbol on the other. Two of these in each set of three represents the unique trait in question, and like the moon symbol are good for two successes. A third rune in each set that can only be cast if you have already earned the other two replaces the trait symbol worth two successes with a special benefit like gain an XP or draw a hero/antihero card, but the symbol doesn't increase your successes.

Your story is told in three arcs: your origin, your motivation, and your destiny. You will add three cards to your chronicle for each of these. The cards will add symbols to your story allowing you to cast more and different types of runes and which runes you have available will shape which cards you choose to draft.

There's a fair amount of randomness here. The runes are really clever and they work well, but they don't always go your way. Also, the cards available will frequently not line up with the runes that you have or want to gain, and you will be forced to try to earn a card that you don't really want. 

On the plus side, if you fail that card goes away to be replaced by another and you gain an XP, but this ends your turn. XP is a currency in the game that can often be spent to take certain cards, to gain specific runes for a single test, or they can always be spent to remove a card from the offer and add a new one.

Call to Adventure is a game that I play purely for the experience of the immersion. At the end, it's nice to win, but it's more fun for me to try to craft the story that I want to tell with the cards.

Favorite Game for December 14th

 #11 Let's Go! To Japan

  

  

In Let's Go To Japan players draft cards showing locations and activities in the cities of Tokyo and Kyoto. The different cards have symbols showing the type of experience that the location or activity has to offer as well as a description of the activity or location itself. All of these are based on the actual things that people might plan to do should they take a trip to Japan.

Each player has a board that shows 6 days of the week, Monday through Saturday. It's your job to fill your vacation itinerary, assigning 3 cards to each day. The days themselves are each assigned a random "theme." That's the symbols on the cards that I mention above. Playing cards that match the day's theme to that day will give you bonuses.

  

  

This part of the puzzle is complicated by the fact that the cards also score bonuses based on these symbols. Such cards are looking for the symbols played previously in your itinerary timeline. Getting the right combination of bonuses from cards and from matching a day's planned theme is at the core of Let's Go To Japan's puzzle. 

Further complicating things is the fact that switching between cards based in Tokyo and those based in Kyoto requires taking a train. Careful planning that allows you to claim a train ticket as one of your bonuses will score you points. But if you have to take a train ride that you haven't planned ahead for will give you negative points. 

  

  

Julie and I don't generally like closed draft style card games because they don't play well at 2 players. Let's Go To Japan is an exception. A special turn track shows which cards each player will take and how many to pass to their opponent. However, when you pass cards to your opponent, you are placing them into their discard pile. 

This streamlines things immensely, and means that you are really focused on making your choices. You don't have to wait on your opponent to finish or worry about what they have chosen. You can focus on your own options and just discard the cards you don't want. It doesn't really "feel" like a closed card draft at all, but it is.

  

  

The turn track changes up the draft from turn to turn, indicating when to draw cards from the card decks and when to take up the cards in your discard pile. It's very organized and easy and makes the whole process seamless and quick. Let's Go To Japan gives me Trekking Through History vibes in the best possible way. If you like that game, you will like this one. I like the puzzle in Let's Go To Japan even more myself. And the theme of planning a vacation? Well, let's just say, "That's Julie's happy place." If you get the chance, give Let's Go To Japan a try. It's awesome!

Favorite Game for December 13th

#12 Expeditions

In Expeditions players are Mech pilots in an alternative history 1920's Siberia exploring a landscape tainted by a corrupting dark miasma that has fallen as part of a meteor shower. Every player has an individual player board that represents their Mech. Players also choose their character. All characters come with  a unique animal companion.

Mechs along with character/companion provide unique starting abilities for the players. On your turn you can perform one of three abilities, but one of the three is always hidden and this changes from turn to turn. The abilities are: move, play, and gather.

Move is moving your Mech on the board. Play is activating the cards in your tableau. Gather is activating the ability printed on the board where your Mech is located. You start play with two cards in your tableau, your character and your animal companion, and these are designed to work together. You can acquire more cards by activating card draw locations around the board using the gather action.

The board is made up of giant hex tiles and we have the awesome deluxe playmat for our version of the game, but this is optional. The tiles closest to the starting area of the map are face up, but further away the tiles are face down and must be explored in order to take the actions on them. This is where corruption comes in.

Unexplored tiles have a certain amount of corruption on them. Players all have strength and guile and must use this resource to remove corruption to clear the new tiles. Gathered cards, explored tiles, removed corruption, all of these things trigger different landmarks during the game. Each triggered landmark sees a player place one of four stars (wooden star tokens) onto that landmark spot on the starting/score board.

The first player to place their fourth star triggers the end of the game and all of the different stars placed are worth differing amounts of victory points and the player with the most victory points is the winner.

Julie and I love Expeditions. It's probably the adventure game that we collectively like the most. Travelling around driving a Mech and adventuring with your animal companion is fun to imagine. All of the art is stunning, and this is one of the few games that we have invested in more deluxe components like the playmat. It wasn't strictly necessary, but we wanted to do it, because we just really love the game.

Favorite Game for December 12th

#13 Obsession

  

  

In Obsession, players are families competing to gain the favor of the Fairchilds. The Fairchilds are a well to do family of the highest reputation and the most eligible son and most eligible daughter in all of high society. Obsession is basically, "Pride and Prejudice" the board game. Think of Downton Abbey or Bridgerton and you get the idea.

Your family are social climbers. You have an estate and some reputation. But, you are going to need to do much better, if you want to attract the attention of the Fairchilds. You do this by improving your estate and at the same time, enabling yourself to host activities that will create social contacts for you. The more and better social contacts that you have, the better your reputation. 

The better your reputation, the more likely one of the Fairchilds will take notice of you. The game is played over a number of rounds. Some of these end with a social event that can see one of the Fairchilds showing an interest in your family. This adds a Fairchild card to your personal deck of contacts, and that can be very powerful. In the final social event, winning a Fairchild will add the card to your deck for final scoring and these cards are worth a lot of points.

  

  

Obsession is a heavier, meatier experience. The game play centers around your ability to host events and to do this you must manage your staff, your maids, butlers and other servants. This is very much like Downton Abbey. The servants are meeples, the family and their guests are cards. These components combine together seamlessly to create an amazingly thematic experience.

Obsession is kind of a masterpiece. It has the best integration of theme and game play of any game that I have played. Everything works, and everything makes sense. The game's components are not the prettiest. The designer/publisher is not an artist. The cards make use of public domain images of all the different peoples of the period, and that's fine, but these are then enhanced by amusing factoids about each person that elevates every card. Every component in this game is somehow better than it should be.

I love Obsession. The game play is intuitive and engaging and fully supported by the game's theme. This is a fully immersive experience that I somehow manage to play well, while also losing myself in the story of the game. That's how good this game is. The story of the game makes me want to compete. It makes me want to gain the favor of the Fairchilds. While I'm losing myself in its story, I'm also playing the game well. That's the best kind of game!

 

Favorite Game for December 11th

#14 Forest Shuffle

In Forest Shuffle players are each building their own forest out of cards. Players draw from a huge deck of cards that contains trees and lots of other plant and animal life that can be found in a forest. Players start with six cards in their hand. Some of those will be trees and some will be those things that live in, on, or around the trees called collectively, "dwellers" whether animal or plant.

To start, you're going to want to play a tree. Trees are vital to your forest and to the game of Forest Shuffle. All other cards (the dwellers) are played attached to the trees that you have already played. All dweller cards show 2 different dwellers on them. These cards are divided either horizontally or vertically in half. Those cards that are divided horizontally in half will show dwellers on the top and bottom of the card. Those cards that are divided vertically in half will show dwellers on the left and right of the card.

To play a dweller card, you slide the half of the card showing the dweller that you are not using under a tree card that you have in play. In this way the dweller that you want to place into your forest is showing, and the other dweller on the card is hidden. If you don't have any trees in play, then you can't play dweller cards.

All cards that you play from your hand, dwellers and trees alike, have a cost. This cost is paid with other cards. Cards all have these little colored tree leaf symbols on them that sometimes matter when paying a card's cost. You can always pay for a card with any other card in your hand, but sometimes paying with the leaf symbols of a specific type will give you a bonus.

When you pay for a card, you discard the number of cards equal to the cost of the card that you want to play. These cards are discarded face up into an open supply called, "the clearing." Players can draw from the cards in the clearing on their turn. A lot of the decision space in Forest Shuffle is deciding what to keep in your hand, and what to discard to pay for the cards that you play.

Each turn players either play a card into their forest, or they draw two cards in any combination from the face up cards in the clearing or from the face down draw pile. Some care needs to be taken however, there are 3 "Winter" cards in the bottom third of the draw pile, and should the third Winter card be drawn, the game immediately ends and everyone's forest is scored.

Forests are scored based on card combos. Some dwellers like to be with other dwellers and score based on those combinations. Some dwellers score based on the kinds of trees that you have in the forest. Things like that. Trees also score based on different conditions. I have even managed to win a game using almost nothing but trees. 

If you ever need to play a dweller but don't have any trees in your hand, you can always play a card face down into your forest. The backs of the cards show a "tree" called a sapling. These don't score points, but can hold dwellers and are always available. There are plenty of "real" trees however, and I have never had to play a sapling into my forest.

All players also begin play with a card called the "cave" and some dwellers, like the bear, will put cards into your cave. These are worth points at the end of the game. Almost every card has some special way to give you points in Forest Shuffle. There is a ton of variety here, and it's that variety that makes this game so interesting, challenging, replayable, and fun!

  

Favorite Game for December 10th

#15 DC Deck-Building Game

A few weeks ago, I posted about a trip to Columbus, OH. We visited a few game stores while there, and I found two previously difficult to find expansions. I also discovered a new version of an older game (that I had long regretted purging from my collection) the DC Deck-Building Game.

In the DC Deck-Building Game players collect cards from a central market to create an increasingly more powerful deck. Power (the game's meta-currency) is used to "purchase" cards from the market and to defeat super villains.

 

A stack of super villain cards act as the timer for the game. These are expensive, powerful cards that players are able to add to their deck once they are "defeated." As one super villain is defeated and the next in the stack is revealed, the new super villain imposes a penalty on all players that is thematic to the super villain card in question.

The super villain cards add a bit of thematic flavor to what is really a pretty thematically disjointed game. Sure the cards each have an internal logic that works thematically for that card, and the players each have a character card that works at a similar level, but when all the moving parts are put together, the game play doesn't "feel" like superheroes working together to fight super villains. And that doesn't matter, not at all.

The thematic disconnect of the overall game play doesn't matter to me. The thematic ties of the individual cards is fun. Seeing my favorite heroes and villains depicted on the cards is enough. It's enough because the game is fun. The DC Deck-Building Game is really fun. It's easy to learn, teach and play. It moves quickly and the game play loop is satisfying and engaging. It's awesome!

Favorite Board Game for December 9th

#16 Botanik

Botanik is a two-player only tile laying game where players work to arrange tiles in order to form groups of pipes of matching colors. The trick to the game is how the tiles are drafted. There is a player board between the players. Across the middle of the board are five tiles placed randomly to start the game. On my side of the board there are five spaces, one in front of each of those tiles across the middle of the board. My opponent also has five spaces on their side of the board.

Each turn three tiles are drawn at random to create an offer. On my turn, I need to select one of the tiles from the offer to place in one of those empty spaces. In this way, I am able to take ownership of the tile. However, I can only place a tile in a space if the adjacent center tile shares something in common with the tile that I am trying to claim. 

I have to match a center tile's shape or its color. If I can match one of those things, I can place the matching tile in the empty space next to its neighbor. If I can't match a tile, I can always place a tile in the center row without restriction.

Once a tile has been placed in an empty space on a player's side of the board, it is locked there. That tile will stay there until it is released. A tile is released when any tile is placed in the center row that causes it to become mismatched with its neighbor. Once a tile no longer matches the center tile, it falls free and becomes a resource for the player who had originally trapped the tile on their side of the board.

A freed tile is placed in your pipe matrix building puzzle. Sets of colors and pipes with flowers will score points and will help a player to win the game. There's a lot of interesting strategy here, figuring out how to release your own tiles without giving tiles to your opponent, or alternatively releasing a tile on your opponent's side of the board that you know they aren't ready to place in their matrix (but they still have to do it.)

Botanik is a cool, thinky 2 player head to head puzzle game and one of our favorites.

Favorite Board Game for December 8th

#17 Finspan

In Finspan players are Marine Biologists exploring the ocean from the sun lit shallows to the darkest depths in order to study various forms of aquatic life. Each player has a board that represents their area of exploration. The board is divided into a grid of 3 columns and 6 rows. The cells created by these rows and columns are sized to fit cards. Cards represent fish, and players want to fill their boards with as many cards as they can.

Every action you can take is right in front of you on your player board. Right at the top, in a section of your board that spans all three columns is the ability to place a fish card. It's the first thing on your board and the first action you'll probably take on your first turn. Everyone starts with a hand of cards and you'll want to get a few of those down as soon as possible.

Playing cards onto your player board costs resources. These resources can be cards in your hand that you will have to discard (but don't worry, the game gives you many opportunities to reclaim discarded cards) or they might be little fish, or eggs, or cards that are already on your board, that you must cover up to show how one fish eats another. (You can't get these "eaten" cards back, but they will be worth points at the end of the game.)

Most cards will provide some addition benefit when played to your board. The card may allow you to play another card, add little fish tokens or eggs to your board, or may give you special benefits of additional points at the end of the game. There's a lot tied to this one action, but everything is spelled out on the cards, and everything is intuitive and thematic.

Some cards provide an ongoing benefit that is triggered each time the card is activated. That has to do with the column actions. Each of the three columns on your player board is associated with an action that you can take. The column powers allow you to draw cards, add egg tokens to some of your fish cards, hatch your fish eggs into little baby fish tokens, and move fish around to form schools. The strength of these actions depend on what fish you have discovered in that column. 

Your player board has different zones representing depths of water. There's a shallow region, a middle region, and a deep region. Each region has a special power that can be triggered when you activate its column, but only if your explorer has discovered at least one fish (placed one card) in that column's region. Your player board has one fish pre-printed in a different region of each of the three columns. So, at the start of the game, every column will do something even if you haven't placed any cards.

You'll want to place cards in unexplored regions to allow more actions to be triggered in each column. You'll also want to try to place fish that have ongoing actions on them that you can trigger that will compliment the actions that are already there. It's a little engine building puzzle that is quite satisfying, 

There's enough to think about to keep the game engaging, and I really enjoy it. Also, the fish cards all contain beautiful illustrations and fun fish facts about the specific fish featured on the card. I didn't know how much I liked fish, or how interesting they were before I played this game. Finspan is awesome!

Favorite Board Game for December 7th

#18 Wild Gardens

This is a vibrant set collection/recipe fulfillment game where players are wandering forager chefs who travel from place to place gathering delicious ingredients in the wild and then cooking and sharing their skillfully prepared meals by having picnics with strangers that they meet along the way.

As silly as that theme sounds, Wild Gardens is great fun. Each player has a set of worker tokens with numbers on them. You place the worker token on your player board at one of three locations that represent the actions that you can take on your turn. You can forage for ingredients at one space, cook or serve your prepared food at another, and either gain a new ability by reading a book you borrowed from the library, or you can save a recipe from the market to prepare later.

Placing the token in a spot lets you perform the "either/or" base action in that spot plus any actions that you have added to that worker spot by reading library books. The number on the tokens are how much you must move your player pawn on the central board. This is important, because you will need to be in the right place to gather the ingredients that you want, or to cook and share your wonderful bounty.

The folks that you share your meals with are represented by cards and each person on a card likes certain kinds of foods, giving the person what they like wins you the card and scores you victory points. There's also a secondary victory point track in the form of jars that appear on some people cards. I think it represents folks that like your food so much, that they put some in a jar to take home. I'm not sure, but in our last game, collecting jars made a big difference for Julie and she won!

Wild Gardens is so cozy and funny and while it's theme is kind of nonsensical in that "I could definitely see this as the plot of an anime." kind of way, that is actually among its strengths. I love every thing about this charming vagabond chef's adventure board game!