August's New Board Games
5 September 2024
I played a lot of new games in August! I really feel like I should have posted my views on the new games as I went along rather than as a monthly roundup because there’s a lot to remember! A full eleven of the twenty different games I played were new to me. The vast majority of the new-to-me games were from trying things out from the board game library at ACNW. We don’t necessarily pick things we’d like to own, just stuff that catches our eye and looks interesting.
I played three board game adaptions of video games this month. Video games don’t reliably make good board games. Some just don’t simplify themselves enough for the table. I was quite surprised to find that all of these were pretty decent though.
Anno 1800
I jumped on the chance to play this because I’ve really enjoyed the video game, but I was expecting to be a little disappointed. But it turned out that this computer to table translation is as good as any I’ve seen. It’s a quick moving game that has the same core of building factories and moving resources about with a limited supply of workers to run the factories. It doesn’t try to do everything the video game does but uses a mechanism where each worker you have draws you a card and you have to fulfil it’s requirements to score it which feels much the same as keeping the workers happy in the video game. First to empty their hand wins. It’s not the most exciting game every but it was pretty decent, I enjoyed it and would be very happy to play it again.
Dorfromantik: The Duel
There’s a coop version of this game but we picked the competitive two player version from the board game library. Neither of us had played the video game before playing the board game. It’s a game where each player gets the same set of tiles to place to try and score various tasks such as having a railway of a particular length, or a village of a particular size. It’s pretty simple and our major problem with it was that our layouts got a lot bigger than we expected and we struggled with table space. Even the second time we played when we thought we’d compensated for that. The main problem I have with the game is that both players use identical pieces which means one player draws at random and the other has to hunt for the matching piece in their collection. I felt like some small numbers on the tiles would have helped a lot when as I found we were having conversations like “one with a house and a field”, “oh, but not that way round” all the time.
When we got home we went and tried the video game out and it’s very much the same thing, if you know the video game you’ll get the hang of the board game easily. I liked the board game a lot but honestly I think I’d rather play the video game now I’ve tried it.
Stardew Valley
The teenage offspring had played this video game and I’m vaguely familiar with it but I’m not sure either of those helped us much with getting up and running with the board game. We picked it from the board game library when we realised we hadn’t played a cooperative game all weekend and we enjoy them. Once you get the hang of the way the actions in the game work though it’s a pretty simple rule set but there are some complicated decisions to be made, which is how I like things to be. There’s a lot of cards here that can randomise the game, we played with the starter set, and we got lucky with the combo of other tasks we were given so the game wasn’t too hard but it still burnt our brains a bit trying to make sure we had everything done in time.
Thing I haven’t seen before: The mechanism of a cat that wanders between players randomising the first player is delightful (and you can flip it to be a dog if you’re weird and that’s your preference 😄).
We think we just about eked out a win. We had to speed run the last few turns as we had misunderstood the time the board game library was closing and they came looking for the game as it needed to get packed up to go home. Definitely one I’d like to play again!
I don’t think anything else new I played this month was originally a video game!
Farshore
This is a version of Everdell, which I love. It’s a bit more complicated than base-game Everdell since they’ve added a boat that does some kind of other way of picking up points, but simplified the system of which critters can move into which constructions for free. The components are just as delightful as the original. The lighthouse is a nice nod to the table presence the tree has in the original game without being as dumbly unwieldy to play with. Maybe we just played it when we were tired and really should have gone back to the hotel but I didn’t like it as much as I like the original game.
Flamecraft
There be dragons! The artwork here is gorgeous. I have forgotten exactly how the game worked but there are a selection of dragons that move around the slowly growing selection of shops in a town and I remember it being a nice puzzle of trying to get dragons in the right place to get resources during the game but also wanting to leave the dragons in the right places to get you points at the end of the game. And of course your opponent has their own plans. And in my case my opponent totally tonked me by racing through scoring cards during the game. I’d be happy to play again.
And I don’t know if this was a deluxe edition or something like that but it made me feel that more games should include playmats rather than boards as it was lovely to just unroll this along the table.
Rolling Heights
I think this was my favourite game of ACNW weekend and also about the only one I won; these facts may be related. You are building a city where you lay out blueprints for buildings and then construct towers on them out of not-Lego 1x1 blocks. The weird thing is that there are no dice to roll, instead you roll your meeples in a box! If the meeples end up on their backs you can’t use them. If the meeples are standing up you can send them to work! And if they are doing the lying on their side thing they work a bit but not as well as if they are standing up. Initially I thought this was going to be a stupid mechanic but the game is well designed and it works. You can push your luck by re-rolling until about half of them are ready to work for you after which there is a penalty if you re-roll. It’s worked out so that the penalty is minor in the early game when you have few meeples and more punishing later in the game when you have a lot. Also I like how you can’t really do odds calculations like you can with dice. The table presence of the game is also outstanding as you build the towers across the board.
My only criticism would be that rolling things near to the towers always felt a bit precarious, though we didn’t have any disasters. And I think I’d struggle to convince players of lightweight push-your-luck dice rolling games to play the more involved building game, and conversely players who’d like the tower placement and resource collection game might be put off by the meeple rolling. I like variety though and this was a well implemented game that’s different to anything else I’ve seen.
Glow
This is another game with great artwork. I played a Japanese edition brought along by a member of my board game group so I have no idea what any of the cards were called though! Each player is rolling dice to match the symbols on the main board and move their hiker up a mountain where reaching different camps scores you different amounts of points. But also you are drafting sets of dice and cards that also give you points depending on what you roll.
I loved the combination of the black and white artwork with the jewel like dice. The game felt a bit random at first where some players had a lot more dice than others; but some cards reward you for not rolling particular symbols so you quickly learnt that you didn’t want to draft some of the dice colours if you could help it. Definitely more to the game than it looked like at first and one I’d be happy to play again.
Zendo
How have I never come across this game before? There’s a huge set of shapes, three different shapes which each come in three different colours. One player has a rule and they build two different structures from the shapes, one that meets the rule and one that doesn’t. Each of the other players tries to guess the rule by building their own structure that they think either meets or doesn’t meet the rule. There are a couple of ways to get chances to guess which I won’t go into here but they’re not complicated.
I really enjoyed it, it’s my kind of logic puzzle. And even playing as the master is a lot of fun as you try to make structures that meet your rule without making it obvious what the rule is. One of the rules I had was simply that the structure had to have all three colours in it and watching the other players talk about how the placement of the block and the pyramid mattered when it was blindingly obvious to me that the colours were all that mattered was really fun.
I liked how there were cards for the rules as I think otherwise people would be inclined to overcomplicate it when in fact even simple rules can be hard to guess. A good fun game that anyone can join in with, I think my family would like this one.
Caldera Park
At this point I’m starting to forget exactly how all these games were played! This involved laying out tiles to make groups of animals on different terrain and whilst I can’t remember exactly how it worked I do remember that we both found it super brain burny.
9 Lives
There seem to be a billion different trick taking games doing the rounds at the moment and I’m not a big fan of them. They are usually quick and easy and even though each has a different gimmick I get bored with them quickly. In this one the gimmicks are that when you bid how many tricks you think you’ll win you can hedge your bets and pick two adjacent numbers - there are lovely cat tokens that help you do this - and the numbers wrap round so if you overshoot the two tricks you hoped to get then you can try for six. Which was fine, and cats always help, but the bit I really liked is that the winner of the trick has to take one of the losing cards from the trick into their hand. That messes up a lot of ways that standard trick taking works and I liked it better that way.
Balloon Pop
We picked a simple game to fill the gap before dinner. I think this would have been better with more than two players. It’s sort of anti-tetris where the pieces float to the top of your board and you try to make patterns with them. Looked nice but we didn’t think it had enough depth for us, and wasn’t fun enough to make up for that.
Avenue
Another little easy filler game. A flip and write game where you draw certain shape of path according to the number and try to join different farms together. Not the most exciting theme but though it doesn’t look as pretty as it, unlike the game above this was both simple and fun.
