Another turn of the Wheel. 2025 was a banner year for board games, which by extension means it was a banner year for Best Week. Down below, you’ll find an index of the year’s picks. Click on any of the images to be whisked to the corresponding article. To the old year! To the new year!
Day One! Picture Perfect!
Day Two! Heart of Darkness!
Day Three! Beatrixmania!
Day Four! The D.T.R.!
Day Five! All My Children!
(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)
In those now-unreachable years before my daughters came along, I remember balking at certain statements. “Some things you simply can’t understand until you have children,” someone would say. Now that I’ve had kids, I’m adult enough to admit they were right… but still juvenile enough to believe they were drafting their offspring into props to prove a point.
And what, exactly, have my daughters taught me? The unnamed emotion of putting an infant to sleep on my stomach. The mind-blanking terror of sitting beside a hospital bed. The way even the simplest of board games can become profound shared experiences. What follows is a list I never thought I would write: the games that transformed my year not because they were innovative or philosophical, but rather because they let me pass a few meaningful minutes with my girls.
#6. Tic Tac Trek
Designed by Trevor Benjamin and Brett J. Gilbert. Published by Alley Cat Games.
The third in Alley Cat’s line of mint-tin games, Tic Tac Trek initially seemed like the afterthought of the group. For one thing, unlike its predecessors Tinderblox and Barbecubes, it isn’t a stacking game. For another, it’s a riff on Tic Tac Toe, the worst way to pass time in church. (Besides actually listening to the sermon, obviously.)
I should have known better than to doubt Trevor Benjamin and Brett J. Gilbert. Tic Tac Trek is as smart as they come. Your goal is indeed to make three in a row, but here your marks are tiles drawn from a bag, injecting tension and doubt into every move. What’s more, you hope to ignite your campfires on the edges of the play space, earning points for every uncharted territory around them, but risking subtractions as the game progresses. It’s a masterclass in shared incentives and painstaking blocking — but on a more relevant level, you should have seen me beam when my elder daughter absolutely swept my dad with a series of clever placements.
Designed by Reiner Knizia. Published by Bitewing Games.
Look, I agree that Iliad, Ichor’s companion title, is the stronger of these Knizias. But Ichor is the one my elder daughter fell in love with, and by extension the one we played time and time again, her monsters sweeping across the foothills of Mount Olympus. As a game, Ichor feels tailor-made to appeal to chess-loving children. It’s basically the answer to the question, “What if every piece could move like a rook?” The answer is silly at times, especially when somebody leaves a lane unattended.
Of course, Reiner Knizia knows better than to let one of his games fall apart just for the sake of some silliness. Ichor stands apart because its objective isn’t to capture opposing pieces. Indeed, most pieces can’t capture at all. Instead, you’re here to scatter all your tokens across the board, a task made all the harder because your opponent also has a stable of their own rooks for replacing your tokens with their own. It’s only through careful play, including cautious use of your team’s special abilities, that you can get ahead. My daughter can beat me over half the time now. I couldn’t be prouder.
Designed by Takashi Ishida and Richard Garfield. Published by CMYK.
The surest sign of a board game’s success comes when my parents, relative agnostics for the form, ask excitedly if I brought it to Christmas brunch. Magical Athlete is one of the best board games ever designed, and I say that without reservation. Low player agency? Fart noise. Who cares. This is one of those rare games that can be played by four-year-olds and octogenarians with equal delight.
And the recent CMYK edition is more or less the game’s platonic ideal. Everything has been touched up: the character abilities, the extra racing circuit, the way racers are drafted, even the wooden miniatures. Ever seen a giant baby take up an entire space? The game is packed with little jokes, some ludic and others visual. I have yet to encounter a bad play of this thing. Or, crud, even an average play. My kids now insist we pack this thing to any sufficiently large family gathering. It’s that good.
Designed by Kevin Wilson. Published by Incredible Dream Studios.
Designed during the doldrums of a global plague, A Gentle Rain technically released in 2021. But in a testament to the format’s timelessness, it emerged as a household regular only this year. As a game, I was initially reluctant. The play consists of matching tile edges to create blossoms. Not much to it. There’s a win condition, but it’s squishy. To be frank, the entire project initially struck me as indulgent and patronizing.
I was wrong. Oh, so wrong. My younger daughter has always struggled with the largeness of her emotions. Being able to sit and undertake simple, soothing, repetitive actions has been a blessing. She cheats at the game; since it’s cooperative, nobody cares, and she also insists I cheat as well. It’s short enough that we can squeeze it in before school. And it’s calming enough that it has been become a reliable staple for helping her gain some space from an overwhelming task. As an exercise in mindfulness, A Gentle Rain exemplifies the strengths of tabletop games.
Designed by Tim and Ben Eisner. Published by Druid City Games.
Over the past year, we’ve tackled a number of campaign games. Most of them have quickly proved tiring. I won’t list examples; Best Week isn’t for downers. But the one title that consistently brought us back to the table, charmed us with its bright palette and upbeat characters, and kept us turning pages despite some rather, ah, expressive writing, was Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders.
What are Unfolders? I could tell you, but it wouldn’t make any sense. Like most board game adventures, Tidal Blades 2 is a bit of a mush. But it’s a lovely mush. Even the monsters are worth seeing. We spent many nights poring over the game’s scenarios, my older kid tinkering with her character while my younger one perched on my lap for a side battle between her own hero and some spare creatures. This is the first board game that my kids could tell you about the lore. It helps, too, that I was also invested, not only because of the kiddos, but because the game’s world is so vibrant that even this weathered sack of bones found something worth defending.
It’s unthinkable that two goofball racing games came out this year, both with limited player agency, wacky characters, and broad appeal, and that the best of them wasn’t Magical Athlete. In our house, we were already Jon Perry fans. Between Spots for the kids and Scape Goat for the bigguns, there’s no denying his range and talent. Hot Streak bridges the gap with a Golden Gate of remarkable craftsmanship. Also, it’s a useful inroad to the topic of gambling. Look at what DraftKings did to these poor addicts, now reduced to wagering on the outcome of underground mascot races. Is this the future you want for yourselves, kids? Betting your life savings that a hot dog will eat asphalt?
Maaaybe. Above all else, Hot Streak is a scream. It captures the thrill of spectation, breaking down the barrier between play and passive observance. But, look, that’s grown-up talk. The real takeaway is that this is a perfect game because you can bet big on an angler fish running backwards across the finish line. We love it.
Do people still D.T.R.? When I was a youngling, the acronym stood for Define The Relationship, that belly-clenching moment when two people would sit across from one another, lock eyes, and hold a serious discussion about whether to go steady. Nowadays it probably stands for Do The Rhombus. What is the Rhombus? I couldn’t tell you. Too old, me.
Something was in the air this year. Love, sex, breakups, and awkward situationships, to be specific. Weird, I know! For whatever reason, 2025 was the year we decided to actually get squishy for once. What follows are the year’s strongest exemplars.
#6. Conviction
Designed by Xoe Allred. Published by Lunarpunk Games.
It was deeply tempting to feature Xoe Allred’s Persuasion, as it remains one of the finest board games about relationships ever designed, and moreover now has a shiny new release from Hollandspiele. But I featured its print-and-play version back in 2022 — the topic of the day was “trauma,” take from that what you will — so instead this seemed like a good chance to talk about Conviction, the spiritual sequel to that game.
Conviction is the morning after of relationship games. The dream couple has been sealed in holy matrimony. Hooray! Only now it seems they didn’t discuss something important during the trial period. Oh no! Blending role-play, card counting, and all of ten minutes, Conviction is Allred’s portrayal of what happens when a couple quarrels, thus beginning either their reconciliation or the end of their mutual journey. With some investment from both players, it’s a striking meditation on… well, pretty much every adult relationship, to be honest. Mine, anyway.
Designed by Brendon Fong. Published by Skeptical Otter Games.
Trick-taking and shedding represent two sides of the same coin, a statement that surely won’t get in me trouble with the purists. We Need to Talk bends that coin into a möbius strip, tasking its duo with both winning tricks and pruning uncomfortable memories. That’s because they’re going through a bad breakup and are now trauma-dumping their shared reminiscences, good times along with the bad, awkward, and in-between.
We’ve all been there. Most of us. Not the dream couples, I guess. They’re stuck in the entry above this one. What makes We Need to Talk shine is the way it merges its conceptual framework with its gameplay. The illustrations capture the moments that make up many relationships, only to fade into the background or linger intrusively in the back of your character’s mind. Will you press onward to something new, or remain trapped in a memory prison? That’s up to you.
Designed by Connor Wake. Published by Always Awake Games.
“So, which of our friends killed us?” has got to rank up there as one of the most awkward questions one spirit can ask another while awaiting reincarnation. Especially when it’s the fourth time your group has been killed by an embarrassing shared accident. Did we explode this time? Get poisoned? Were we swept away by a tornado while watching Twisters, despite ample warnings that a storm was bearing down on our location and that we might be trading our lives to view a cinematic catastrophe?
Whatever the reason, whoever the culprit, it’s our job to figure them out. Or conceal them, if you were the one responsible for our fellowship’s untimely demise. That’s the Spirit! is as peculiar a social deduction game as they come, chock-full of strange abilities and uncomfortable social circumstances, both on the table and above it. It’s an extended conversation about who screwed up this time. Don’t expect anybody to take responsibility for free.
Not many board games are as charming as Adulting, a title about surviving a hectic weekend full of chores, anxious screen time, and maybe, just maybe, some self-improvement. The core concept is deck-building, but in the most fluid fashion imaginable, cards bouncing in and out of your hand with nearly every action.
But Adulting is also a relationship game almost entirely thanks to its multi-tiered objectives. Everyone at the table must work together to avoid burnout, caused by the pileup of too many chores. At the same time, everybody has a different idea for what they hope to get out of their weekend, and is given free rein over how to pursue that goal. While some players work together to tackle the chores, others are free to irritate their housemates by pursuing their objectives at all costs — or even mark themself as the self-sacrificing parent willing to absorb the group’s stress. The result is an affectionate portrayal of cooped-up group dynamics.
I’m not actually sure how to describe The Hedgehog’s Dilemma in a snippet. Part fable, part exposition on a philosophical metaphor by Arthur Schopenhauer, and part marriage proposal, this trick-taker covers quite a lot of ground. As in Adulting, the victory conditions provide much of the context. If everyone’s pieces occupy the same space, everybody wins together. If they’re all apart, everybody loses. More likely, if some are together and others are apart, the game kicks over to a scoring phase that grows increasingly desperate and/or thrilling with each successive tally.
There are other wrinkles, but that’s enough to set the stage. Often, all it takes to flip the switch between magnanimous and petty is the reveal of a single card. It feels like a parable in game form, drawing out social behaviors through simple rules and clear incentives. I can safely say I haven’t played anything quite like it.
Designed by Jo Kelly and Cole Wehrle. Published by Wehrlegig Games.
There’s a warm heart at the center of Molly House; a warm heart that beats in spite of moralizing cruelty, and which might be stilled by fellow hearts that have succumbed to panic. As a “molly” — a queer person in Georgian England, one whose identity likely strikes most of us today as foreign — your task is to find joy among the arcades and drinking-houses of London. This is a fraught business. Almost assuredly a doomed business. But a business worth pursuing nonetheless.
Over the past year, I’ve had the privilege of introducing Molly House to a wide range of players. Some have been like myself. Others have been queer in varying shades. In nearly every case, the response has been a surprising wellspring of empathy. Molly House is, among other things, full of parties both riotous and sad, fidelities and betrayals, and surprises both great and small. Every so often a board game comes along to succeed where every other medium has failed, investing us in a time and place that would otherwise go overlooked. Molly House is that game.
Whew! That’s a lot of board games about relationships. Did you play any such titles this year? And if so, what were your favorites. Come along now. D.T.R. for me. (Define The Recreation.)
(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)
I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a publisher have more of a bottle rocket year than DVC Games. Home to the design collective Jasper Beatrix — which thankfully avoids the pitfalls of the now-defunct Prospero Hall by offering actual attribution — DVC Games has established itself as a cradle of innovation. Even when their individual titles riff on the familiar, they’re undoubtedly riffs, jazzy little grace notes that bring their own interpretation to the genre.
Which is to say, this is the tightest focus ever featured in Best Week. These folks deserve the plaudits. Just take a look.
#6. Karnak
Designed by Jasper Beatrix. Published by DVC Games.
Like a lot of the titles on today’s list, Karnak is sorta many things. Sorta a stacking game. Sorta an area control game. Sorta a cutthroat contract game. It’s all of those things and none of those things. It’s what you get when a child-pharaoh demands a cool plinth with a rockin’ statue, then changes his mind and instead wants a bunch of sideways pillars over a river. Why? Because the brat is nine years old, that’s why.
In practice, Karnak is a little uneven, although its unevenness is also no small part of its charm. What, you expected the god-king to be consistent? Pshaw. Stacking together strange monuments, only to repurpose some of them into new edifices while others are ossified thanks to obnoxious priests, that’s just how it goes when you’re an ancient architect. No aliens required.
Designed by Phil Gross and Jono Naito-Tetro. Self-published.
The only title on this list not strictly published by DVC, Medusa’s Garden was nevertheless crafted and developed by the Jasper Beatrix crew. I suspect the form factor — a deck of cards and a hand mirror — prevented its inclusion as a boxed release. Picture this: a social deduction game, but with none of the pressures that accompany most social deduction games. Instead, it’s presented as a duel between two players: Perseus, who wants to deliver a swift chop to Medusa’s neck, and the famous gorgon herself, lurking among a garden of stone statues, determined to crumble them before Perseus can ruin the party.
A perfect convention game, then, one that sits halfway between performance art and logic puzzle while never once failing to be hilarious. And all that when over half of its participants have the simplest goal of all: stay very, very still.
Designed by Jasper Beatrix. Published by DVC Games.
I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to tableau builders, but I contend that ninety percent of the things have no idea why players want to build these spaces in the first place. It isn’t only the brain-tickling pleasure of arranging icons in proximity; it’s the possibility of exploring that space.
Scream Park is a love letter to seasonal haunted houses, and what it understands is that we don’t only want to build the things — we want to get scared silly along with their visitors. That’s why each round concludes with a VIP guest, somebody we as curators must fear in our own right: a fire marshal, a gang of birthday brats, an internet influencer looking to dunk on our subpar effects. We build the space for maximal fright, rejiggering the components from last year’s leftovers, and try to sell this season’s guests on the illusion. It’s silly and satisfying as only a perfect tableau-builder can be.
Pacts is emblematic of this publisher’s whole deal. Designer Ben Brin takes a concept, in this case “I divide, you choose,” jettisons what makes the mechanism tired in every other setting, and gives it new life. There’s nothing here we haven’t seen before, strictly speaking, but every edge has been polished to its finest shine. Or sharpened into a stake, perfect for driving through your opponent’s skull.
Set in Ireland of legend, Pacts has it all. Strange creatures, devil’s bargains, and a surprising number of ways to get ahead. With all the cruft subtracted from the design, what remains is a pared-down but rich experience, a fantastical conflict that occupies less than half an hour but contains enough drama for a game five times its size and duration.
Designed by Jasper Beatrix. Published by DVC Games.
If you’d asked me back in March, I would have insisted that Signal would be one of Best Week’s #1 games. Based on first contact fiction — squint a little and you can see the grainy target-cam footage of Arrival — Signal is a cooperative effort between one alien and a crew of translators. Between those two groups and a whole lot of failed experiments, the rules of the alien’s language emerge one line at a time. It’s translatorpunk, to fall back on the trope of slapping -punk onto the back end of an otherwise ill-suited descriptor.
What makes Signal work so well, though, is the sheer variety on display. There are dozens of aliens in the game, each with their own rules. Some want pieces placed in relation to one another; others stack pieces, or use pieces that shove other pieces, or deploy pieces that transmogrify into different colors. The rules are myriad and ever-changing. And it’s up to you to deduce their meaning.
Designed by Jasper Beatrix, Jakob Maier, and Bobby West. Published by DVC Games.
At a glance, Here Lies is perilously close to Signal. One player takes the role of an aging detective recounting decades-old cold cases. (In one scenario, a millennia-old cold case!) Everybody else gathers round to try and figure out the solution. It’s a blend of locked room mystery, Encyclopedia Brown short stories, and Sherlock Holmes serials.
But what sets it apart from every other detective game is that Here Lies refuses to present one more logic puzzle. Instead, it’s a chance to get creative. You’ll play hangman, draw a picture, summon a snippet of dialogue, or test your vocabulary with some word association. As new evidence trickles onto the table, you’ll draw unexpected conclusions that bring the group inexorably closer to the truth. It’s perhaps the most striking of the Beatrix collective’s titles, a brilliant summation of a design ethos that evokes the game’s literary inspirations while sidestepping the tropes of every board game that came before it. When I first sat down to dig into the box’s contents, I had no idea I was holding a quiet revolution in my hands.
Okay, so there’s a real problem on our hands, because I want you, the reader, to give me your own recommendations. But this is the narrowest topic ever featured in Best Week. So perhaps share your own top publisher of the year, complete with examples? Who opened your eyes to new possibilities over the past twelve months? Go wild.
(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)
This will surprise absolutely nobody, but I am sometimes accused of being a big old bummer. A downer. A morose feel-bad baby. Nietzsche said that if you stare into the abyss it’ll gaze back, and I’ve found that to be true, but in locking eyes with the abyss I also find we come to an understanding. We’re poorer in spirit if we don’t lock eyes with the void now and again.
There were a number of void-locking titles this year. Today is a celebration of the best of them. Take my hand, abyss. It’ll be all right.
#6. Night Soil
Designed by Jon Moffat. Published by Grail Games
Poop! Night Soil begins with a joke, keeps on giving that joke, and then sneaks up on you with a point about the hidden work that keeps civilization chugging along while everybody sleeps. Set in a Tudor London that’s packed to the gills with human filth, players adopt the role of gong farmers and mudlarks, the dirty workers who muck out the gutters and cart it to the river. It’s grimy, greasy work, made all the grimier and greasier for Jesse Gillespie’s rancid card illustrations.
But what a game. Most human lives have gone overlooked, but not all of them have gone quite this overlooked. Which makes Night Soil not only a rollicking title about the dawn of sanitation, but also a work of social history that ought to be taught in science-starved classrooms. How do we keep civilization running? By carting the poop to the sea. Oh, and by the way: Poop!
Designed by Yoni Goldstein. Published by The Dietz Foundation.
If you have no right to protest, you have no rights. This truism is at the heart of Chicago ’68, a game that feels all too timely five decades and change after the events portrayed, when right-wing violence has been so normalized that masked thugs kidnap citizens and non-citizens alike in the streets without repercussion while every act of disagreement gets labeled the end of civilization by a complicit corporate media.
But that makes Chicago ’68 necessary. It’s a reminder that conscientious people have always struggled to craft a better world, have always marched uphill through teargas, have always founded awkward coalitions, have always, sometimes, suffered setbacks and loss. There’s more to say about the game — for instance, that it’s a good game — but for now, its potency as a reminder is enough.
Designed by Matt Leacock. Published by Z-Man Games.
The Lord of the Rings has long been the modern world’s parable of resilience, a detail that sometimes gets overlooked in our hurry to strip-mine it for monsters and elves and general aesthetic. That it still retains its power is a testament to Tolkien’s skill as a writer.
Fate of the Fellowship understands that legacy. It’s a game about hope: its loss, its tenuousness, the way it stands firm or crumbles in an instant. Every time I play it, there’s at least one moment where I’m not sure we’ll pull through. The wraiths have backed Frodo and Sam into a corner. The hordes are descending on a beleaguered haven. Gondor can’t get its poop in a group. But then, a miracle. Reinforcements. A lucky roll. The horde blundering along the wrong path. When that happens, those prickles run up my legs, just like they did all those years ago when I read the trilogy for the first time. I’m a kid all over again, learning that I can slay dragons.
Designed by Jay Cormier and Sen-Foong Lim. Published by Off the Page Games.
Corps of Discovery is a strange game, in no small part thanks to the strangeness of its source material. One part critique of the American colonial project, another part distasteful male gaze for Sacajawea, the comic series is an unsettling portrayal that sometimes doesn’t know where its head is at. The board game adaptation lingers in that headspace. Are we here to kill monsters? Yes. But also, we’re here to bend this land to our will. To remake it in our image.
Okay, some of this stuff is basement-level subtext. I don’t think the game fires on all cylinders without first reading the material it’s adapting. But in its proper context it hits many of the right notes, providing plenty of grisly work for its alt-history Lewis and Clark expedition. It’s grimy in a way that most board games never manage, with a wilderness that feels appropriately hostile and enemies that would rather eat us than become us. Heart of Darkness, indeed.
Designed by Bernard Grzybowski. Published by PHALANX.
There’s a mode Purple Haze excels at, one where the player is invited to do terrible things and have terrible things done to them, one which leaves a sick feeling in the stomach, but does so without moralizing or offering an easy escape. As a squad of U.S. Marines, your troops are a tough match for their opposition. They’re well equipped, well trained, and have the advantage of artillery. But they’re also expendable to the machine that has sent them here. That expendability, both of body and spirit, is never far from mind. As the injuries accumulate, as hidden hurts become all too real, as the inability to tell friend from foe becomes uncomfortably present.
Like the rest of the titles on this list, the result is an imperfect game that still has a lot to say about our imperfect natures. Call it synchronicity, because I’m not sure a perfect game would fit in this company. Whatever the reason, Purple Haze is one of the most gripping and personal portrayals of infantry warfare ever put to cardboard.
Designed by Francisco Gradaille. Published by Salt & Pepper Games.
Board games don’t often truck in obscurity. In a media ecosystem where ambiguity is already an imperiled species, this simply isn’t the strongest medium for muddy waters. Under normal circumstances, anyway. Francisco Gradaille’s Onoda asks us to inhabit the shabby boots of Hiroo Onoda, the second-longest holdout of WWII. Along the way, Onoda commits regular war crimes, steals and bullies and kills, and steadfastly refuses to face the reality that his empire has been shattered and his cause is futile.
Is this denial? Insanity? A last-ditch attempt to avoid prosecution? Gradaille doesn’t offer an answer. Instead, he walks us through Onoda’s daily life and the passing decades. Unlike many of the titles on this list, the landscape is bright and cheerful rather than overcast. It’s you, the protagonist of this tale, who falls like a dark cloud to steal a radio or hold villagers at gunpoint. As an examination of a man who insists he embodies manliness while fleeing from his responsibilities, Onoda provides a clear-eyed portrayal of a real-world horror story.
Whew! What a big bummer we were today. What were your annual bummers, dear reader? Share all the bummers below. Let us become bummers together, and in being bummed, dispel the bumminess.
(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)
What a year. Best of times, worst of times, that’s what we’re supposed to say. For board games, though, 2025 was a banner year, full of tremendous titles both big and small.
As ever, Best Week is a celebration of the board games that struck me the most roundly, and today I’d like to cover the games that won me over thanks to their beauty, at least in part. These are the games that transported me to new places, that showed me wondrous sights, or that used their visual design in such a way that I found an old topic illuminated in a manner I hadn’t considered before.
#6. Skara Brae
Designed by Shem Phillips. Published by Garphill Games.
I have a thing for the Neolithic. Mesolithic, too. Chalcolithic, Paleolithic, Bronze, Iron, you name it, if it’s about humans I’m probably at least a little bit interested in what we were getting up to. Skara Brae is the tale of a human settlement that was old long before the period it covers. That’s the point. Its homes are dug into the midden left by centuries of human activity, that sediment of shells and bones becoming the foundations and walls of something new.
And it’s a looker. Not only for Sam Phillips’ illustrations, although they’re lovely. But also for the layout. Skara Brae is an inventory management game, your stockpile filling with tools and food but also waste. Everything has a use, if you bother to search for it. The result is a particular interpretation of human settlement that’s optimistic and vibrant, a counterpoint to more hard-pressed titles about human survival under harsh circumstances.
Designed by Dominic Crapuchettes. Published by North Star Games.
There’s a hint of sadness to Nature, at least in my reading of it. As the natural world retreats mile by mile, as microplastics crowd into raindrops and highways enclose the wilderness, the biomes and food chains that are the domain of Crapuchettes’ masterpiece recede like my hairline until all that remains are the fringes.
I’m being morose. Nature isn’t about such things. This is a card game, one descended from the competitive scene of Magic: The Gathering and a hundred other titles, worked and reworked until every card interaction is perfect, gorgeously illustrated to evoke a realm most of us will never get to encounter. Calories and population are the objective, evolution is the method. As your creatures develop more traits, hopefully they emerge better suited to tackle the challenges arrayed before them. Not often does a game leave me in awe of both its mechanical and visual purity; this is one such design.
Designed by Jamey Stegmaier. Published by Stonemaier Games.
Have we exited the phase of Vantage’s discourse where it’s cool to rag on this thing? Vantage is a shocking accomplishment, arguable weaknesses included, offering a multilayered world that unfolds like a map only to unspool like a ball of yarn only to peel apart like a sticker book. Every nook and cranny has something new to see, to touch, to taste. Sometimes to kiss. If those wonders should prove a little… undirected… well, that’s how actual adventures turn out sometimes. Even the principal criticism of Vantage reveals something wonderful about it.
And what a place. Part science fiction, part fantasy, all colorful dimensions, Vantage is both an illustration and a solution to the “map problem” that hounds pretty much every other adventure game. By offering a space you can actually get lost in, Stegmaier pulls the best trick of all: letting you find yourself.
Designed by Paolo Mori and Alessandro Zucchini. Published by Ingenioso Hidalgo.
Somebody’s going to insist this is the mismatch of the list, but hear me out. Battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars is a revelation. Not so much of individual illustration, but of what a hex-and-counter wargame can accomplish. Rather than stacking its chits to the heavens, Mori and Zucchini limit each space to two pieces, their arrangement providing a visual shorthand for the unit’s capabilities. Two chits beside one another make a firing line; arranged in a square means a column; splayed apart communicates a broken unit in need of a good smashing.
It isn’t long before the battlefield, in all its complexity, lays itself as bare as a color-coded chart. By making its space legible, the game gives the player command of its shifting lines and flanking horses; in turn, it isn’t long before clever maneuvers and risky feints become possible. This isn’t how Napoleon saw the battlefield — it’s far too vertical for that — but in its own gamey way, it feels like it.
Designed by Johan Benvenuto. Published by Libellud.
In abstraction, clarity. Harmonies is another title about the natural world, albeit one where humans have some limited presence, their red houses sharing space with mountains, rivers, and forests. More than that, it’s a game about topography and elevation. Trees soon pile atop trunks, mountains crane upward, and rivers and prairies settle into their basins where they belong.
And into these niches wander creatures. Even represented as cards and cubes, Harmonies evokes a particular impression of nature, like seeing a model of the surrounding area at a natural park. Carving a river in between mountains in order to place otters in their proper habitat is its own sensory delight. Or maybe I just like stacking those wooden discs. They feel so good.
Designed by Pablo Clark. Published by Eerie Idol Games.
I have a jealousy in me for The Old King’s Crown. It isn’t right that a single person be this talented. Pablo Clark designed, illustrated, world-built, balanced, you name it, and seems to have emerged on the other side with his sanity intact. Maybe he would say “relatively” intact. So now he’s humble and charming, too? What a world. What an unfair world.
More seriously, The Old King’s Crown is perhaps the densest lane-battler ever made, which makes it all the stranger that it was never intended as a lane-battler. Two to four factions jostle to rule a kingdom that’s coming apart in the absence of its ruler, and each of them presents its own culture in miniature. Whether you’re playing as the old guard, the barbarians at the gates, the revolution, or another completely distinct revolution, everyone brings their own story to the table. It’s a game of bitter reversals and successes that are very hard to not whoop about. If I didn’t have to write about other games on occasion, I would try to play it one hundred times. For starters.
Anmelden
