To me the best games are ones where deep decisions rise from a simple rule set and interwoven player interaction. But to my chagrin there has been a trend, over the last few years, towards heavy games where the weight of gameplay derives from the complexity of the rules. This isn’t to say anything bad about those games, but they aren’t what I gravitate towards.

This is why I love games by Splotter Spellen. Their games are a perfect blend of streamlined rules and emergent complexity, and I think they’re far and away the best publisher on the market. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve introduced to games like Food Chain Magnate and The Great Zimbabwe. As my love of Splotter grew, I began searching out as many titles from their collection as I could. Over time I acquired their “Big Five” - Food Chain Magnate, Roads & Boats, The Great Zimbabwe, Antiquity, and my personal number one game - Indonesia. But beyond these five gems, Splotter’s lesser known works still eluded me, in particular Bus.

I’m not sure what is was about Bus that made me scour the internet to find a copy. Maybe it was the kitschy…

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One of the most rewarding parts of the board gaming hobby is getting to share it with the people around you. Whether it is friends you’re showing Pandemic for the first time, family members gathering to play The Resistance, or a close group of gaming friends coming together for their twentieth game of Agricola, gaming is one of my favorite ways to spend time with the people around me.

Since meeting my significant other Emily, she has developed an affinity for gaming, and we have grown as a couple by playing games together. Here are the top 6 reasons enjoy gaming together.

Gaming gets you away from the TV

Getting home from work, it is easy to turn on Netflix or a video game, get sucked in to that, and practically forget your significant other is in the room with you. Playing games is the perfect excuse to put down the controller and talk to the person across the table from you.

We recommend Welcome To as the perfect game to get you away from the TV. Instead of watching a 25 minute episode of How I Met Your Mother, take on the task of building the perfect development. The gameplay is quick enough that you don’t need to…

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Before introducing you to our nominations for Game of the Year, we should ask “what makes a game eligible?”. Is it artwork, or gameplay, or variety, the designer or publisher? It’s not just any of those, but a melange of all of them together. A mysterious combination that gives a game a flair it can call it’s own. Something that makes you want to play it time and time again.

Perhaps you’ve played all of the games on this list, or none. But regardless these titles have proven that they deserve their nomination, and a chance at winning the Diamond Climber award for Game of the Year!

Root

Andrew Plassard: So much has already been said about Root. From the gorgeous artwork, to the clever asymmetric gameplay, to the interesting player interaction there is something in the game for everyone. Each player has to learn an entirely unique rule set and method to score points. Root has so much gameplay and every time you attempt to take over the forest it will be a different and unique experience. I absolutely adore Root and I think it is one of the most unique and interesting games that have come out in the last few years. Even if it doesn’t sound like something that would be up your alley, I…

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Every so often I like to consider seemingly arbitrary constraints as a challenge to my gaming tastes. I was inspired by one BGG user’s journey to cut his collection from 300 to 18 games , this seemed like an interesting thought experiment. Instead of cutting to 18, I (theoretically) cut my collection of about 180 to 10, with some caveats. Let me know what you think.

1. Age of Steam

Age of Steam is a game all about trains, building tracking, connecting cities, and delivering goods amongst them. The gameplay revolves around an incredibly tight economy where players have to consistently take loans to pay for track and engine upgrades with the hope that their income, established from making deliveries, outpaces their spending. Each round of the game, players are forced to make tough decisions in an auction for special powers which may let them crucially build first, urbanize new cities, or lay additional track.

[caption id="attachment_11061" align="alignnone" width="730"] Rending of the box art and graphic design from the fourth edition of Age of Steam (coming to Kickstarter in 2019)[/caption]

Age of Steam is the quintessential heavy gamer’s replayable title. There are somewhere north of 150 map expansions for…

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It is hard to deny the popularity of cooperative games. Gloomhaven currently sits atop the BoardGameGeek top games list. It seems like numerous Kickstarter campaigns have coop variants as stretch goals, and even though some of these work better than others (I'm looking at you, Root), it is undeniable that more and more people demand cooperative experiences. 2017 saw two of the biggest hit coop games - Spirit Island and Gloomhaven and 2018 has seen a fair number of great titles as well. Here are our nominees for best reprint of 2018.

The Mind

The Mind is a game built entirely about not communicating with the people around the table. Starting with one card in round one and progressing up to twelve, the players have a simple task - play numbered cards in order. What quickly happens is two players holding a 29 and 33 card stare each other down until one decides to play the card. Though the game is simple, the tension is real. Read our full review of The Mind.

Codenames: Harry Potter

The Codenames formula is simple, setup a 5x5 square of words and the players work to find combinations of the words matching their clues. Codenames: Harry Potter uses the Codenames: Duet (read our review of Codenames: Duet

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There are plenty of reasons games go out of print: publishers want to move on to the newest hotness; game rights are lost between publishers and designers; the game never made it across the pond. Whatever the reason, we appreciate when a publisher takes the time to breath new life into a previously hidden gem or forgotten favorite. Even better, from time to time publishers will not only reprint the game, but spruce up the reprint in a variety of ways. Here are our nominees for Best Reprint of 2018.

Container

Originally published in 2008, Container is an economic simulation about running the best shipping company. The gameplay focuses on producing, storing, and collecting the containers that are most valuable to you. What separates Container from so many other simulation style games is the play and interaction between the competitors is entirely emergent from the actions of the players around the table. With no randomness and a streamlined rules set, the complexity and depth of gameplay is created by maneuvering and pivoting around the decisions of your opponents.

Container is one of my favorite games and it absolutely deserved a reprint. A large part of the gameplay was collecting containers on your ships transporting them to their destination. Mercury Games…

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Not all board game ideas make sense from the outside. The Mind is a coop game with no communication (except mind reading), Mao is a game where you don’t explain the rules, and Safranito is a dexterity economic game. What’s great about board games as a hobby is that games don’t always need to make sense in order to be good.

Q.E., or quantitative easing, is a fairly simple auction, set collection game with a twist - you have as much money as you want! Thematically, you’re a central bank trying to inject funds into your economy after a financial collapse. You have unlimited access to your printing press to bail out failing companies but if you print too much you may cause your economy to collapse.

NOTE: all photos in this review are of the original edition of the game from Gavin Birnbaum and Cubiko games. More than likely your edition will not look like these photos.

Overview

The gameplay is simple - there are sixteen companies that will be auctioned throughout the game. Each company is part of one of four industries, and is located in one of four countries. At the start of the game, each player is assigned a country and…

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On First Take Fridays a number of authors around Meeple Mountain give short first takes on games that are new to us. This week we have takes on Paper Tales, Keythedral, Teotihuacan: City of Gods, and AuZtralia.

Paper Tales - Ashley Gariepy

I have to begin by mentioning the artwork in Paper Tales. The box art is lovely, but it doesn’t quite prepare you for the fascinating layered art on the cards. Each image looks like it was created using coloured pieces of paper or felt, cut out and laid on top of each other. This adds such a unique texture and depth to each card that I have yet to see in any other game.

Paper Tales is a card drafting game where players are building up a village, recreating a legend, or telling a story. Honestly, I’m still unclear on what the theme actually is so I’ll just say you are drafting helpful characters and constructing buildings.

These recruited characters could score players points during the war phase, earn income, or provide resources needed for building. Recruited characters will also age at the end of every round. Aging works like this: any characters without an age token (which I thought looked like mold) receive one, but if there is…

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On First Take Fridays a number of authors around Meeple Mountain give short first takes on games that are new to us. This week we have takes on Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra, Indian Summer, Dungeon Mayhem, and Obsession.

Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra - Ashley Gariepy

Is Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra different enough from the original Azul for someone to justify having both in their collection? This was my main concern when I heard about this new version.

Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra shares several similarities with the original, but the differences are where Sintra shines. On a player’s turn, they have 1 of 2 actions from which to choose. The first, similar to Azul, is to take pieces of the same colour from a Factory display or the centre of the table and add them to a single strip’s pattern on your player board. The second option, instead of taking pieces, is to move your Glazier (pawn) to the leftmost strip of your player board. This is an important action because you can only add pieces to a strip that is below or to the right of your Glazier and the Glazier will always hop over to the strip onto which you place your pieces.

Scoring is…

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On First Take Fridays a number of authors around Meeple Mountain give short first takes on games that are new to us. This week we have takes on Spirits of the Forest, Reykholt, Architects of the West Kingdom, and Codenames: Harry Potter.

Spirits of the Forest - Andy Matthews

Spirits of the Forest is a gorgeously illustrated game from Thundergryph Games and designer Michael Schacht. I couldn’t help but back it on Kickstarter based on the price, the artwork from Natalie Dombois, and the simple gameplay. It raised over $400,000 in January of 2018 and landed on my doorstep at the beginning of October.

In Spirits of the Forest players are collecting 10 different spirits from a central playing area. Each spirit tile has a value on it and one or two icons. Players receive points for collecting the most of each spirit, and lose points of they don’t have at least one of a spirit. Players additionally receive points for having the most of each various icon type.

I was really eager to get and play this game as I knew my kids would love it. Spirits of the Forest is easy to teach, quick to play, and offers some really fun tactical choices. The tiles are shuffled and placed…

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On First Take Fridays a number of authors around Meeple Mountain give short first takes on games that are new to us. This week we have takes on Solenia, The 7th Continent, Illimat, and The Estates.

Solenia - Ashley Gariepy

Solenia was one of my most anticipated games of 2018. I love designs published by Pearl Games (Troyes, Ginkgopolis, and Otys) and Sébastien Dujardin so you can imagine how excited I was when I had a chance to play an early copy of this game.

Solenia is a game about a planet that has lost its day and night cycle: half the planet is plunged into darkness while the other half only has light. The people living in darkness seek the resources exclusive to the light side and vice versa. Players gain resources in order to help each side of the planet satisfy their needs.

Solenia is a hand and resource management game played on a modular board using some pretty cool cards. Each player will have a hand of 16 cards with a hole cut out of the centre. Why? Because on your turn you will play a card to the board and gain the resource visible in the card’s centre. The number on that card (0, 1, or…

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On First Take Fridays a number of authors around Meeple Mountain give short first takes on games that are new to us. This week we have takes on Tulip Bubble, Ground Floor, and Dark Side of the Mine.

Tulip Bubble - Ashley Gariepy

Tulip Bubble is a stunning game with a beautiful table presence. At a recent local convention, our game caught the attention of every person who walked by and had them all asking if it was Dutch or a game about gardening. Tulip Bubble is actually an economic stock market game by Taiwanese publisher Moaideas Game Design (Mini Rails and the recent Symphony No. 9). You can imagine the look of intrigue and surprise whenever I told this to someone.

Tulip Bubble casts players as Dutch investors in 1636 at the height of Tulip Mania, the world’s first major economic bubble. In this game, players are trying to earn the most money by buying and selling tulips. At the beginning of each round, the stock market experiences an event that could increase or decrease a tulip’s stock and, at the end of a round, tulip stocks will be adjusted based on the current demand. Players can anticipate (and mess with) the stock values because they are given a preview…

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On First Take Fridays a number of authors around Meeple Mountain give short first takes on games that are new to us. This week we have takes on KeyForge: Call of the Archons, City of the Big Shoulders, Startups, and SPQF.

KeyForge: Call of the Archons - Ashley Gariepy

My only experience with a CCG or LCG was collecting Pokémon cards in elementary school. For me, they were simply the new fad because I watched the TV show and liked the Game Boy game. Since then, I haven’t had the desire to invest my time, money, and energy in this style of game. I was, however, intrigued by KeyForge: Call of the Archons, especially since it’s designed by Richard Garfield.

KeyForge is a tactical card game in which you reap æmber and use it to forge keys (among other things). It simulates a collectible card game without any of the collecting since the game introduces completely unique, prebuilt decks. Each deck and its card combinations will never be duplicated (apparently there are more than 104 quadrillion possible decks) and it requires no boosters or deck building. All the hard work has been done for you!

Since I’m a euro gamer, trying to strategize and maximize the card powers really…

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