2019 Five Year Look Back

by sean johnson

One of my annual traditions is to do a look back at the games that were released five years ago and see what I think stands out now and has stood the test of time.

This is a year that my gaming habits started to change. In the middle of 2019, I moved for work related purposes to a much more rural area. I had to leave the regular gaming groups I played with behind. Unless I wanted to take up Warhammer 40k, the closest places to play games were now an hour away from me. For a whole host of reasons I was not able to seriously look into those options, until about March of 2020. Of course we all know what happened next.

For the most part, 2019 was a fairly good year. A number of the games that came out that year are ones that I count among my favorites. Because it is impossible to play everything, I have not played some of the more popular releases of 2019 including Tapestry, Maracaibo, and The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine. However, I do not really have a strong desire to play any of those games. The game from 2019 that I have not played but that I am the most interested in is The Taverns of Tiefenthal.

Overall I have have played 76 games that were released in 2019, and of those I think these are the ones that stand out as the best:

10. Undaunted: Normandy
I think this game is incredibly clever. Using deckbuilding to power a squad based war game is a really novel concept. This is one of two games on the list that we do not own, and that is because my wife did not like it as much as I did. For that reason we eventually traded it, but this is a game I am more than willing to play again.

9. Commands & Colors: Medieval
The command and colors system is versatile and works so well. Personally, Memoir 44 will probably always be my favorite of the series but it handles battles where spears, swords, and arrows are used just as well as guns and tanks. This is a good implementation of the system, but honestly this release was a little disappointing. The battles presented are in the 400-600 time range. Technically that is the early medieval time period, but the name of the game summons up images that are more from the High Middle ages (1000-1300). Fortunately, I am not the only one who had that disappointment and GMT responded. The first expansion for the game is a course correction that will focus on the battles of the Crusades.

8. Marvel: Crisis Protocol
I played this game for the first time last year. While it is never a game I would invest in, I would love to make friends with someone who collects all of it and lives close enough so that I can play with their toys. This is a wonderful super hero game that lets players create teams of supers and fight them. Everything about this game works in delivering the theme, and even though I only played it once (and lost) I had a blast.

7. Aquatica
My wife and I are wanting to get our underplayed games up to at least five plays this year, and this is one of them. We have a tradition every year of buying a random game over the summer to play. It has to be a game we have not played and do not really know anything about. This was our 2021 game. We played it then and liked it well enough. We both like the hand management aspect of this game and thought the raising locations from the depths was a neat mechanism.

6. Star Wars: Outer Rim
Speaking of games I have not played enough, this one is also on the list. I actually was one of the first people to get a copy of this game when it was released in limited quantity at the Star Wars Celebration. Our review on the game got featured in the Geek Weekly newsletter, and it might just be our single most viewed post. Even though I have liked the game the few times I have played it, I can tell it is a little lite on content. I have heard the expansion is almost a must for this game, and I should probably try to get it before it is too hard to get.

5. Kodachi
The shorthand description of this game could be The Ninjato Card Game. In my opinion, it is the best part of the board game (the push your luck raiding of the houses) and focuses just on that. This game is a lot of fun. It also is rated 4,312 and has less than 400 ratings so I think it is also a legitimate hidden gem.

4. Cartographers
This game was not on my radar at all, but the name caught my eye at Gen Con in 2019. A game about map making instantly had my attention. It turns out that this is easily my favorite roll and write game (or roll and flip as the case may be). I really like the way scoring in this game works, and making maps is a lot of fun.

3. Wingspan
I did get to play this game in 2019 shortly after it was released, and I instantly thought my wife would like it. However, we were not able to acquire a copy of the game until November of 2020. It turns out that I was right, and this has been a game that we have played quite a bit. At Gen Con in 2023 I did manage to trade for a copy of the Europe expansion but we have not yet experienced it.

2. Unmatched: Battle of Legends, Volume One
For a while Star Wars: Epic Duels was my grail game, so I was interested in the idea of the system being reworked and updated. Despite that I initially passed on this game, and that is because I found this initial offering to be so uninteresting. I did not pick anything Unmatched up until Cobble and Fog was released. Even though I eventually picked up Legends Vol 1. because I gotta catch them all, I still thematically find these fighters less interesting than most of the others.

1. Res Arcana
At the end of May in 2019 we took a short trip to visit the town we met in and graduated college from. While there we stopped in at a local game store with hopes of finding a good game to be our random summer game for the year. This is the game that we ended up with. We knew nothing about it other than recognizing the designer from Race for the Galaxy. Of all our random summer games, this is easily the best one we ever bling bought. I have played this with people who insist on only using the draft option. However, I personally prefer this game when I am dealt eight random cards and have to figure out how to make the best of it. I have recorded over 60 plays in this game, and it still feels like there is so much life to this game. This is one of my absolute favorite games of all time, and (for me) easily the best game of 2019.