December recap: I could either drown, or pull off my skin and swim to shore

by Sean Franco

I'm several days late with this, as I usually try to get these blogs out on the first of the month. But between a very busy holiday, a very busy workload at my job right now, and the much longer than normal year-end wrap-up, delays were inevitable. But now I'm here, even with less gaming than normal due to travel. Christmas went mostly well, with only a few issues arising, mostly with sad news from friends about health or marriages. My daughter has gotten old enough to not only really get into the Christmas spirit, but to really remember all of the little moments of the holiday. I'm back in the swing of things now gamingwise, with Geekway Mini coming up in a couple of weeks and meetups starting as soon as this midwest blizzard lets us. But enough about snowy weather; let's do the numbers.

Top 100 Games

I have posted my sixth annual Top 100 Games geeklist. There was some fluctuation within it. Ten games newly broke into the top 100 (which means ten games left), and the top 25 had a shakeup, including changes in the top ten. Reiner Knizia is the designer with the most representation here, with a full eleven games, including my number one game.

New-to-me Games


City of Six Moons
I don't have a lot to say about this yet. It's really cool and really confusing and I barely know anything. I'll keep you folks abreast with any progress, behind spoilers of course.


Chicago Express
This is a foundational cube rail, I'm led to believe. There are certainly some neat parts of it that I can see very cool if you just want to slam out game after game of it. I liked the way that we slowly ticked up to dividends and I liked the way that income both increased and was diluted. I wonder if this is really a cube rail for me, though; I did have fun, but not as much fun as when playing random Amabel Holland train games.


Railways of Nippon
If this had been a game I had played before Age of Steam, maybe I would have liked this game. Instead, I really, really disliked it. It ported over enough of the bones of Age of Steam that I knew how to play but then missed the ball with so much other stuff. The auctions were worse, the anytime loans were worse, the increased income was worse, and I just didn't like the Operation cards at all. Tremendous miss for me; I'd rather just be playing Age of Steam.


Rebirth
I'll never turn down a random Knizia game. This was simple tile-laying to capture castles that score points and cathedrals that drew cards that scored points in weirder and more diverse ways. The tile laying was reminiscent of Samurai in some ways, especially with how tiles were locked down when placed even if they weren't useful anymore. The cathedral cards were an interesting way to mix up scoring options, but between the card draw randomness and the tile drawing randomness, I'm not sure that the game felt as clean as it could have. I did really like the theme and aesthetic, which felt a lot more optimistic than a lot of games about the end of the world, although that did conflict somewhat with the competitive nature of the game. I would probably play this again, but I'm not seeking it out.


GHQ
I got this for my nephew for Christmas, and he had it out of the box with the rulebook open almost before were were done opening presents. The game design itself is an achievement. To take a chess/checkers board and add somewhat realistic modern military units, but still keep the game fairly simple and and accessible, but still have a fairly large depth of strategy is all incredibly impressive. If Vonnegut wanted this to be a standard family two-player strategy abstract like chess and checkers, he overwhelmingly succeeded. I can only imagine what gaming might have been like if his dreams for this game had been successfully realized. I enjoyed the game, but there's a lot to keep track of, especially in terms of bombardment and how pieces are protected. I don't think in four games I actually saw an HQ captured; generally the losing player would resign when their position got dire enough, even though technically a single infantry and an HQ could win the game on their own. I'm glad I got this game played, but I don't think I need my own copy.


Haggis
I finally got this to the table with my nephew. He's slowly gotten to play some trick-taking games and shedders, so he was already on board with the ideas of this game. He had never played anything with bombs before though, and this game is all about knowing when to play your bombs and when to use your court cards for big scoring plays. Having bomb tricks get scored by your opponent while still controlling the lead is huge, since it forces you into positions of acceptable losses to try to win the whole hand. We played a 250 point game, which took eight hands. Scores were all over the place. I scored 1 point one round and over 100 points the next round. I fell behind in points very early, and basically started using my Big Bet every hand to just catch up. I did manage to land a win, with my nephew failing his Big Bet on the final hand. This was a really neat game, but I don't have a lot of opportunity to play two-player games that are this light weight. Maybe I'll finally read through the three- and four-player rules.


Unmatched: Slings and Arrows
I introduced my nephew to Unmatched two summers ago and he immediately got obsessed. I only have one box of the series, Cobble & Fog, which provides me everything I want from the system both mechanically and thematically. After playing the Shakespearean themed Slings and Arrows, I am finally tempted to consider buying a second box. This one really was cool. We played twice, so I got to see all of the characters. I first played with Titania, who gets random buffs that can be discarded and replaced for temporary gain. I played against Hamlet, who quite thematically slowly sacrifices Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to deliver devastating attacks. I was able to get the glamour buff that gave me a free action every time I played a scheme. I had four schemes in hand when I got that glamour, two of which let me draw new cards. I was able to kill his Hamlet all in that single turn by setting up not only our positions but also his hand. We later played again, and I picked ol' Will himself against the Scottish play witches. The witches are cool because they get two discard piles. Everything goes into the cauldron first, where they can be spent in combination for minor effects before being dumped into the actual discard pile. My character, Shakespeare, kept played cards in front of me until the card names totaled ten syllables or more. If I hit ten actually, I would get a bonus ability. I managed to hit my pentameter every time. This one was a slog of a fight. I killed two of his witches and got the third down to a single life, but I had no defense cards in hand and lost tragically to back-to-back attacks. Obviously, I really liked this box. I'll have to really consider if I want to buy into the series a second time, because this is tempting.

Other Games


Dual Gauge
I taught this to more people. I keep playing the Portugal map so that people will be ready to play some more complex maps, like my new and unplayed Honshu and Wisconsin maps. Hopefully in the new year we will land it.


Food Chain Magnate
We played this at our monthly public library meetup (although I stupidly forgot to reserve the room at the library, so we played at a very accommodating and surprisingly well-lit coffee shop). We played with five, three of whom were new. I did a teach, including going over some very easy mistakes that can doom you from the start. I opened with recruiting girl into recruiting girl/errand boy. I was too late for first trainer or first to throw away food, but I did manage to build up quite a large org chart that was good at sniping demand away from other restaurants. I was constantly wanting to take a turn off just to do massive amounts of training and hiring, but I never felt like I had the time to do it, since I was fighting another player to his $100 first. We both grabbed it in the same turn, but my infrastructure was better set up to finish the game, since he somehow had never hired any managers. I was also able to open a restaurant close enough to him to pull away any of his income. Surprisingly, another player was able to use a luxury manager to have a couple of big houses eat with them for a couple of turns. I was able to stay ahead of her with my free CFO bonuses, bigger infrastructure, and more restaurants. We broke the second bank, itself only medium-sized, and I won with $54 more than the luxury player. This was well-received by all new players, some more quickly than others. It will inevitably be played again this year.


Five Three Five
We played this with four towards the end of a meetup. I once again hovered around 19 points for a chunk of the game. I neither won nor triggered the end of the game, which had its own mixed feelings of satisfaction.


ヒーフー!!
I'm growing a bit colder on this high-precision trick-taker. Being forced to take exactly and only two tricks is stressful. I like the general gameplay patterns, but this is definitely becoming a sometimes game for me instead of a regular game.


Adel Verpflichtet
This was one of my two games from my BGG Secret Santa. This game is an absolute trip of cynicism and bluffing, and while I'm still not great at it, I still had fun with it. I need to play it again soon.


SCOUT
I played this a few times, once at a meetup and once with my sister's family. The game with my sister's family was chaotic, a full five-player game with mostly new players. Everyone picked up what was going on by the second hand, and there were some hugely swingy plays when players went out super early in a couple of hands. My nephew was in a largely unimpeachable position by the end, but we had a lot of fun with it.


Magic Maze
I try to bring a coöp game to my sister's house every year, so that if someone loses, it's not at someone else's expense. (This can be a problem sometimes with some of my younger family members.) This one was hard for them. There's a lot going one with very few moving parts, and the fact that we can't talk our way though it like we do with most coöps made it tricky. We never won it, and unfortunately did not get it tabled again to try to push through to a win.


Just One
We had a small get-together before New Year's with some of my oldest friends. We've known each other since high school and we all play board games to some degree. I had this in my bag just in case a situation like this arose. After a rough start (my wife failed to guess "button" after the only clue she got was "fasteners" and the rest got canceled), we had a really good time with it. I think So Clover! is the better game in this genre, but Just One is a fairly relaxing game comparatively, and that's what we needed this year.

Acquisitions


Pax Pamir: Second Edition
Adel Verpflichtet
My BGG Secret Santa was very generous this year. I've gotten one of these games played and some people very interested in the second. This was a good experience this year, with lots of fun messages exchanged.


Man-Eating House
Idle Hands
My latest order from New Mill Industries came in, just a day before my holiday trip. I actually just threw them in my bag unopened so that I could go through them and learn them while on my trip. I can't wait to get them played, as they both seem to have some very weird twists on trick-taking.

Top 25: New-to-me Games in 2024

This month, I'm looking back at games that I personally played for the first time in calendar year 2024. Not counting expansions (but including 2nd+ editions of games I've played previously), I count 59 new-to-me games in 2024. As such, I've decided to expand my normal Top 5 into an oversized Top 25! (It shouldn't need to be said, but I will say it regardless: most if not all of these games became available before 2024, and 2024 is just the first time that I played them.)


25. Shikoku 1889
This is essentially 1830 with a smaller map and a shorter playtime. There's not a lot of twists and innovations past those two things, but those things go a long way. 1830 is a great game, so it makes sense that a slightly more approachable 1830 is also a great game. A different design with those parameters might have dropped the ball, but this lost nothing in its implementation.


24. Enemy Anemone
I've not played a lot of must-not-follow trick-taking games so I have little to compare this to. I really liked this one though. It's clean, fast, and really fun to same the name of.


23. 21Moon
This isn't the last train game on this list but it is the last 18XX game on the list. This might be my favorite 18XX I've played though. This is mostly due to two majors twists on the theme. One is the game ending by rounds rather than breaking the bank. The second is the two types of bases you run route from, removing the choice of paying dividends or withholding, while creating brand new choices of how to assign your trains. The random board setup is also neat. I still can't roll with the punches of rusting, but I still had a great time with this.


22. The Quest for El Dorado
The elevator pitch is Kniziadeckbuilder, and that's exactly what you get. The card choices are characteristically pithy, like most Knizia games, but that just makes things lean and tight. Playing this makes me want to see what Knizia would do with a maximalist deckbuilder though, maybe something set in the Blue Moon universe.


21. The Barracks Emperors
This is a weird game to get people to play. It's heavier than other trick-takers, lighter than other area-control games, and of a historical con-sim theme that not everyone is taken with. I think it's great, though. This is a trick-taking game with shared infrastructure and spacial concerns, and that makes it worth a look for anyone who's interested in the genre.


20. My City
This was my first big campaign game since we last played Descent: The Road to Legend over a decade ago (and with the excellent first edition). So a Knizia campaign is almost the exact opposite. Nominally, it's a simple tile-laying game. But it becomes increasingly complex and increasingly asymmetrical, with minor decisions having huge ramifications several games in the future. I played it with my friend Dave on BGA, and we went into each scenario blind, never looking ahead at all. I got trounced in the overall campaign, but the experience was incredible.


19. Liberty or Death: The American Insurrection
Every COIN game has its own pitch to those who have experience with the system. The pitch for Liberty or Death is twofold. First is the combat, which is more complex than the simple battles of attrition that guerillas in previous titles have dealt with. Instead, there's a longer formula for determining relative strengths and a whole process for determining losses. The second pitch for L∨D is the fully symmetrical and zero-sum victory conditions: you cannot advance your own interests without pulling away from someone else's. This is quite different from other COIN games, when one player's victory conditions can often be wholly unrelated to someone else's. The theme of the game comes through great, especially with the leaders and the beautiful map.


18. Charms
This and Inflation! could easily swap places on this list, as I really like both titles. These games made me slightly better at bidding, although with Charms, it's easy to get stuck with the lead for several more tricks than ever intended.


17. Inflation!
This and Charms could easily swap places on this list, as I really like both titles. I'll always remember my first play of this, with everyone reading out loud their current play and laughing at the absurdity of the huge numbers.


16. Ponzi Scheme
"Check Kiting: The Board Game" would also be a reasonable title for this game. It does exactly what you would think, forcing players to take increasingly unsustainable debts just to temporarily pay off past debts, with the game ending once someone can't pay anymore. It's absurd and painful and a lot of fun.


15. The String Railway Collection
I've only played one of the two modes in this box so far, but I can tell that this one will stick around. It's almost elemental how simple it is, laying down string as tracks and getting into huge traffic games of too much string in the same areas. It's clever, tactile, tactical, and pretty, which is a nice combination.


14. South African Railroads
There's something about this game that really clicked with me. I really liked the time track, and how it forced you towards dividends similarly to Chex but with a little more freedom. It's also very pretty, the way that all Iron Rail series games have turned out being.


13. Power Grid: The Stock Companies
I generally avoid putting expansions on here, but The Stock Companies turns Power Grid into an entirely different beast. The short description is "Power Grid but what if 18XX?" The longer description is that this is neither Power Grid or 18XX. Using the strategies of either will cause you to do poorly. Instead, it's a game of tempo almost more than its base game that relies of slower and more care investment than a train game usually warrants. In a system already packed with excellent expansions, I feel like this one gets unfairly overlooked.


12. Westward Rails
This is about as breezy of a cube rail as I could imagine, focusing on satisfying routes in such a way that as few other players could benefit but inevitably having to use opponents' track. It's a shame that this game just went out of print, because it's a very approachable title in the genre.


11. A Gest of Robin Hood
A two-player COIN game that goes off of the standard structure and emerges through the greenery of Sherwood Forest. It's not fidelitous to the format as the concurrently developed The British Way, but the narrative-driven innovations help this stand out as not just a good game but a great Robin Hood experience. It's been easier to be Alan Rickman than Kevin Costner for me, but it's been a lot of fun on either side.


10. Bridge City Poker
I've played more shedders this year than probably any past year, and Bridge City Poker stands out amongst them. It's the simplicity of the round structure that helps: everyone gets one shot, then most people draw cards. Shed-out before the deck's out, the box cover says, and that's exactly how this works. It's a race against the inevitable, with unique power cards making just enough of a quirk to make sure that no game is wholly predicable in its play patterns.


9. Fast Sloths
A recent trend of Friedemann Friese has been to mash together a whole bunch of ideas and see what sticks. In Fast Sloths, it's pick-up-and-deliver (where you the player are what is being delivered) mixed with a clever hand management/card discard system. The different animals have unique ways to move around the player sloths, and the game is prone to using the shared animal infrastructure to accidentally set opponents up for huge turns.


8. Bites
It may look like an innocent picnic-themed set collection game, but it's actually a vicious game or portfolio management and investment manipulation. It's also about a picnic. No two games are close to being the same, and there's so much careful timing that cannot be entirely controlled. Use this to trick people into playing a cutthroat economic game.


7. Five Three Five
My top-rated shedder in a list with several, Five Three Five works by manipulating a shared trick in the center of the table. Sometimes you add to it, sometimes you play on top of it, and often you just wipe it and start over. It plays quickly, intuitively, and punishingly. I quite like this one.


6. Pax Pamir: Second Edition
There are fewer consims on this list than I would like, largely because I played fewer consims than I would have liked in 2024, and certainly fewer new ones than I would have liked. Pax Pamir 2e would stand out regardless. It's a tableau builder that has repercussion in a map of shifting alliances and uncertain ownership and loyalty. It's absolutely beautiful and pays careful attention to the nuances of history, being fully respectful of the many intersecting cultures than stood here on the graveyard of empires.


5. The Plum Island Horror
This heavy tower defense coöp zombie game from GMT is a kitchen sink of descriptors but a robust, mean game of survival horror once on the table. There's a lot of subtly in this game, as the relationships and quirks of the town of Plum Island emerge throughout the game, leading to a fairly rich narrative. I've really enjoyed this at four, and I still need to try out some solo games. And the expansion should be coming soon to make it even worse (which means better).


4. Fresh Fish
This had been a grail game of mine to try for some time, and now it's a grail game for me to try to acquire. It's a game of tight auctions where no one has enough money. It's a game of dangerous geography, where paths can suddenly be drawn in all the places you don't want them to be. This is Friese nearly at his best, which is no small feat.


3. Stephenson's Rocket
This was also a grail game of mine. It feels like old school Knizia, when his games were not just interactive but often mean. Almost a take on Acquire's mergers but with a much more dynamic map, Stephenson's Rocket is about managing majorities in multiple categories while trying negotiating vetoes of inconvenient tile lays. This quickly became one of my favorite games from one of my favorite designers.


2. Black Sonata
I often like hidden movement games, but I had no idea how hidden movement would work in a solo game. It turns out that it works perfectly. The combination of chasing down the Lady with deducing her identity through a separate set of logic puzzles is so satisfying. It sets up in a moment, plays fast, and appropriately awards and punishes taking risks. This is a solo game that captures so much that I didn't know a solo game could.


1. TRICKTAKERs
In year two of fully embracing many new and diverse trick-taking games, it seems almost unlikely that I would encounter a new one that would be my best new game of the year. But TRICKTAKERs is something special. The actual trick-taking is almost trivial, with the game playing at most three hands of five tricks each. That's less than some trick-takers have in a single hand. The core of the game is in drafting from the eight widely different characters that provide unique abilities and scoring methods, then finding a way to leverage these characters to get the best results possible from your five card hand. This is a game brimming with strange interactions and clever gameplay. There was no question for me that this was my Game of the Year.

[poll=2060382]
Gridiron

We've had our last game of the season of Mizzou football [microbadge=1218] and… Mizzou beat the Iowa Hawkeyes in the Music City Bowl, 27-24. It was a close game of trading scores that Iowa was leading for most of the game. But Brady Cook looked somewhat healthy again, putting a victorious cap on his fairly impressive true son college career. I don't see him playing on Sundays, so this was a tremendous game to go out on. There's a lot of uncertainty for next season, but getting back-to-back 10+ win seasons is nothing to be upset with. Sadly, I never made it to a game this season, but hopefully I can swing it later this year.

See you space cowboy...