Well, I guess it’s that time of year again.  I’ve been writing Designer of the Year (DotY) articles for over 20 years, but for those of you who are new to the series (or who suffer from temporary amnesia), let me give my usual spiel.  There are dozens of annual Game of the Year awards, covering just about every game category you can imagine.  But the creative individuals who are responsible for these wonderful games—the game designers—have no such recognition.  That’s where I come in.  My goal is to honor the board game designer who had the best overall body of work over the previous calendar year.  Not the best single game, but the best gaming portfolio, if you will.  Among all the game designers out there, who had the best year in 2025?

Whenever there are games involved, there have to be rules, so let’s start with those.  What games are covered?  Just about any title that comes in a box.  Boardgames, card games, dexterity games, Euros, thematic titles—toss ‘em all in.  The one type of game I leave out are children’s games, since their criteria for success is pretty different than games for adults or older kids.  And expansions are also excluded—I want to focus on original designs.  But I do include spinoffs, standalone expansions, and redesigns of previously published games, although they’re not weighted as heavily as original titles.

One main goal for the award is to make it as objective a process as possible and not base it on my personal likes and dislikes.  My own tastes are no more important than anyone else’s and besides, there’s a crapton of games I’ll be considering that I’ve never played.  So to facilitate that, I’ve come up with a ranking method for each of a designer’s games that’s based on the following three criteria:

• Popularity.  How well liked is the game?  I base this on the game’s average rating (and number of votes) on the Geek.  Is this a perfect measure of a game’s popularity?  Probably not—there’s a lot of built-in biases there.  Is it the best data I have access to for measuring that?  Almost certainly, so that’s what I use.

• Award performance.  There’s a permanence to awards that I think is significant, particularly if you’re looking at the rankings years from now.  It’s also provides a different look at a game’s impact that’s separate from ratings.  So how well do I think the game will do with the annual game awards?  I give the most weight to the major awards (SdJ, Kennerspiel, DSP, and IGA), but each game’s performance with some of the other notable awards are a factor as well.  Naturally, wins are worth more than mere nominations, but I still think the latter are meaningful (and much more numerous, of course).  None of the results for any of the awards that the 2025 titles are eligible for have been announced yet (for some reason, the Golden Geeks are being conducted later than usual), so these are based on my projections for how well the games will perform with them.  That’s not ideal, but the object is to get an estimate for award performance, rather than a precise value, and I’ve found my projections usually aren’t too far off base.

• Buzz.  The third, and least significant, criterion is how much “buzz” the game is generating, where I consider buzz to be the attention a game is getting above and beyond its popularity.  A good example of a game that got positive buzz last year is Stonemaier’s Games’ Vantage, which has got a lot of people talking about it, because of how unusual it is.  Adjustments due to buzz are rare, but they do happen now and then and are a good way of handling highly newsworthy games.

Those are the factors I base my designer rankings on.  My goal is to have an objective methodology that considers multiple aspects, which allows me to come to a balanced decision, so that’s what I’ve come up with.

By the way, I make no distinction if a game has a single designer or if two or more individuals get design credit.  It’s impossible to determine who is responsible for what when there are multiple designers and anyone who’s ever been part of a collaborative effort can tell you that being part of a successful team is a skill of its own.  So anyone who is listed as a designer of a game gets full credit for it.  It just seems to me to be the most sensible and practical way to approach things.

As I mentioned, I’ve been writing these articles for over 20 years, but people have been designing games a whole lot longer than that.  And when it comes to games research, I’m the way some people are with potato chips—I just can’t stop!  So I decided to extend the awards all the way back to 1955, just because.  In case you’re interested, you can find a Geeklist summarizing the results here:  http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/170779.  I’ve included some gaming history for many of the years, to go along with the commentary about the designers, so hopefully you’ll find my obsession to be informative and fun.

Last year’s winner was Reiner Knizia and it was the eighth time I’ve picked The Good Doctor as my Designer of the Year.  Yes, you read that right.  Do I still think that selection holds up?  Oh, yeah.  He released the remarkable total of 25 games, including hits like Rebirth, MLEM, Cascadero, and Huang and snagged five award nominations.  Tomas Holek, in his fantastic debut year, gave him some competition (particularly since SETI won more gaming awards than I originally projected), but it was just too much Reiner in the end and I still feel that way.  So no regrets.

Some years, there are a bunch of designers with strong portfolios, but that wasn’t really the case in 2025.  Consequently, there were a lot of designers with very similar credentials.  To handle that, I’ll be looking at 15 designers that I think deserve to be considered for the DotY, considerably more than I usually highlight, but, hey, more is better, right?  I’ve listed each one, along with the titles they released.  If a game is italicized, that means it’s a redesign or spinoff of a title released previously by that designer, so that it carries less weight than fully original designs when I do my analysis.

Okay, enough chatter—let’s get to the details.  Here, in alphabetical order, are the finalists for the 2025 Designer of the Year award.

Scott Almes:

• Tiny Epic Game of Thrones
• The Peak Team
• Hyperstar Run
• Wraith & The Giants
• Lands of Amazement
• So, You’ve Been Cursed

Almes, a former DotY winner in 2020, has led off these articles more often than not since then.  There are two reasons for that.  First, his name starts with an “A”; second, he’s a productive and talented designer.  This is another solid collection, headed by yet another Tiny Epic game—by my count, it’s the 15^th one.  Peak Team is a cooperative game about wildlife rangers, while Hyperstar and Wraith are both solitaire efforts.  There’s not enough here for Scott to compete for his second award, but it wouldn’t shock me if he’s the first name I discuss next year.

Rob Daviau/Justin Jacobson/Noah Cohen:

• Unmatched Adventures: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
• Unmatched: Battle of Legends, Volume Three
• Unmatched: Lee vs. Ali
• Unmatched: The Witcher – Realms Fall
• Unmatched: The Witcher – Steel and Silver

Daviau is no stranger to these pages.  He has a Designer of the Year award to his credit and gets nominated most years, including third place finishes the last two years.  This year is a bit unusual, since all five of his published games are part of the Unmatched series.  Each release in this extremely popular card-based miniatures fighting series of games has a common set of rules, but a good deal of unique mechanics, based on the individuals battling in that version.  Rob works with a design team when he creates the Unmatched titles and there are two other folks who worked on this quintet of games:  Jacobson, who owns Restoration Games, the Unmatched publisher, and Cohen, who works on many of the designs in the Unmatched series.  So the three of them are being nominated as a team.  It’s rare that a design team wins the DotY, but it’s not unprecedented, and even though I don’t give full credit to games in a series like this, they all have exceedingly high ratings on the Geek (ranging from 8.4 to 8.6!).  Will these 3 talents be able to ride the wave of these 5 titles to become the #1 designer(s) of the year?  They’ve got a shot.

Richard Garfield

• Magical Athlete
• Mindbug: Battlefruit Kingdom
• Mindbug: Battlefruit Galaxy
• Mindbug x King of Tokyo
• KeyForge: Crucible Clash
• KeyForge: Prophetic Visions
• KeyForge: Discovery
• Half Truth: Second Guess

Garfield is also a former DotY winner, although in his case, the award came over 30 years ago, for his transcendent Magic: The Gathering.  However, Richard hasn’t been resting on his laurels, as this collection of 8 titles from last year shows.  All, however, are redesigns or games from a series.  Magical Athlete is his big entry, a wacky race between non-human characters that is a thorough redesign of a 20-year old Japanese game from a designer named Takashi Ishida.  There are also new versions of his Mindbug and KeyForge deckbuilding game series.  With no original titles, there isn’t enough here to let Garfield compete for his second DotY award, but it’s nice to see that this designer great remains very active in the hobby.

Johannes Goupy

• Dewan
• Salamandra
• Collect!
• Space Lab
• Legions: Abyss Universe

A couple of years ago, I commented on how many good new designers were coming out of France.  Goupy was one of those and he’s back this year with a nice collection of games.  The most notable one is Dewan, a short middleweight building game that features a nice rating and has gotten some very positive reviews.  When Dale reviewed it back in January, he said it was his frontrunner for the Kennerspiel, so on the strength of that, I’ve projected it will get a few award nominations.  Other solid titles include Salamandra, a worker placement design in a fantasy setting; Collect!, an animal-based card game filler; and Space Lab, another short game where you can probably guess the setting.  Johannes keeps cranking them out and we keep noticing, so I anticipate we’ll continue to hear from him in future years.

Hisashi Hayashi

• Railway Boom
• The Treasure Ship of Zheng He
• Sushi Otter
• The String Railway Collection
• Extreme Mission
• Fantasy Rank Master
• RPG in Memories

Hayashi made the short list in last year’s article, primarily on the strength of becoming the first Japanese designer to win the SdJ (for Bomb Busters) and he’s got another group of well regarded games this year.  The highlight is Railway Boom, an auction-filled rail game set in Japan.  It’s a redesign of an earlier game of the same title that didn’t get much exposure outside of Japan.  It’s got a lot of players quite excited and figures to grab a couple of award nominations.  Zheng He lets players serve in the fleet of the great 14^th century Chinese admiral; it has some interesting mechanics and is also well regarded.  The title of Sushi Otter is misleading; it’s a poker-like game where you can acquiring cards that let you enhance future hands.  It’s another fine collection from Hayashi-san, solidifying his position of perhaps being Japan’s pre-eminent designer.

Reiner Knizia

• Iliad
• The Hobbit: There and Back Again
• Orbit
• Ape Town
• Gazebo
• Ichor
• Meister Makatsu
• Ego
• Qwirkle Flex
• Ra and Write
• Kingdom of Dice
• Biotope
• Merchants of Andromeda
• Pinatas
• Silos
• The Quest for El Dorado: Roll & Explore
• For One: Mensch argere Dich nicht
• Alien Attack: USA
• Niwa
• Karakorum
• Plus 13 other titles

Knizia is approaching his 70^th year on this earth, but he is in no way slowing down.  In fact, at this stage of his life, he has become a well-oiled game design machine, creating an enormous number of original games every year, as well as having the organization and contacts to place an equally enormous number of redesigns and rethemes of his older titles.  Just how enormous?  In 2025 alone, I credit him with THIRTY-THREE games!!!  That is just an astonishing and breathtaking number.  And they’re not all retreads; over half of them are original designs.  They’re also well regarded and receiving a good deal of play.

The highlights include Iliad, a 2-player tile-laying abstract, in which the players are trying to win the rows and columns of the display; The Hobbit, a quasi-roll & write, in which the players draft dice to succeed in a bunch of Tolkienesque challenges; Orbit, a race in space (it’s one of three Knizia-designed games in this sci-fi series); Ape Town, an area majority contest between rival monkey gangs; and redesigns of such titles as Qin (Gazebo), Battle for Olympus (Ichor), Beowulf: The Legend (Ego), Municipium (Silos), Qwirkle, Ra, Merchants of Amsterdam, and others.  Almost all of these cited games have Geek ratings well above 7 and a healthy number of ratings, so there’s quality here, as well as astounding quantity.

If there’s any weakness in this collection, it’s a familiar one for Reiner:  the lack of hit games.  There’s definitely a large number of well received titles, but nothing that figures to be at the top of most player’s favorites lists.  I expect to see a couple of award nominations, but not as many as Knizia got last year.  The question is, will a huge number of good, but not great games be enough to give The Good Doctor his (OMG!) ninth DotY award?

Vital Lacerda

• Speakeasy
• House of Fado

Like Knizia, Lacerda is also a well oiled machine, but his output is very different.  Vital’s specialty is very heavy, thematic Euros and he releases one a year, to the delight of his extremely loyal fanbase.  With only one game published most years, and their weight limiting the number of nominations, he hasn’t gotten a DotY mention until this year.  So 2025 represents something of a breakthrough.  The big release is Speakeasy, a worker placement game in which the players are mobsters in Prohibition Era Manhattan.  This has the sky-high rating Lacerda’s titles usually have (8.5!) and, since it’s a bit more accessible than his usual output, I project it will get several award nominations this year.  Vital has a second game as well, with House of Fado being a middleweight in which the players are managing Portuguese restaurants.  It’s a nice one-two punch;  will it mean that the first mention by Portugal’s most famous designer might be a winning one?

Matt Leacock

• The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship
• Animal Rescue Team
• The Four Doors
• Expo 1889

Leacock has got to be on the short list of best designers to never win a DotY award.  He’s certainly come close.  In 2015, thanks to the brilliant Pandemic Legacy: Season 1, I actually named him my top designer that year, only to have me yank it back following Alexander Pfister’s unprecedented, and unexpected, sweep of the annual game awards.  I felt bad for Matt, who’s one of the nicest people in the hobby, but Pfister’s dominance that year really gave me no choice.

Well, Mr. Leacock is back this year with another nice collection of games and, just as it was 10 years ago, its highlight is the year’s highest rated title.  Fate of the Fellowship is a cooperative design in which the players once again play characters in Lord of the Rings, trying to destroy the One Ring and avoid the clutches of the Bad Kitty.  It shares some elements of Matt’s most famous game, Pandemic, but there are enough mechanical and thematic differences to consider it an original design.  Its Geek rating is very high, both players and critics love it, and it’s currently ranked 108 all time on the Geek, soon to enter the site’s Top 100.  There’s also a very good chance it grabs a gaming award or two later this year.  Additional titles include two more co-ops:  in Animal Rescue Team, you’re evacuating critters to shelters, and in Four Doors, you’re collecting relics behind those titular portals.  Is there enough here to finally earn Leacock his first DotY award?

Paolo Mori

• Toy Battle (i,F)
• Battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars
• Ethnos: 2^nd Edition

Mori’s been designing games for 20 years now and he’s become a reliable and productive game creator who specializes in middleweights and light war games.  His Toy Battle is an example of both, where your “troops” are different toys!  It’s the only title in this year’s article that’s already received some award nominations—in this case, an IGA nomination and a win as the As d’Or Game of the Year (as shown by the letters I’ve listed in parentheses).  Naturally, that helps his cause.  Also assisting things is Battlefields, an innovative and fast-paced system that boasts an extremely high rating of 8.6 on the Geek.  This isn’t Paolo’s first mention on these pages and if he keeps churning out games like this, it certainly won’t be his last.

Taiki Shinzawa

• No Loose Ends
• Quattro Trick-Taking
• Quashars
• Dodictre
• Mirianth Pets

One of the leading trends of this decade has been the explosion of unusual and innovative trick-taking and climbing games, many of them coming from Japanese designers.  And Shinzawa might be the most accomplished creator of these titles, with an unparalleled ability to think outside the box.  2025 was a particularly good year for Taiki.  No Loose Ends is the English redesign of 2024’s Shut the Books, with a far larger print run.  Players bid with the cards in their hand and must “cover” each bid with a trick won by a card of that value or suit.  In Quattro Trick-Taking, each player has a different way of scoring points from the tricks they win.  And in Quashars, the players’ bids are their guess of how many times they will meet that hand’s objectives, which change from hand to hand.  All of these are well rated and have been very enthusiastically received by trick-taking fans.  This is Shinzawa’s first visit to the Designer of the Year pages and I’m delighted to be able to shine a spotlight on this talented individual.

Jamey Stegmaier

• Vantage
• Origin Story
• Smitten 2

This is also Stegmaier’s first DotY nomination and a big reason for it is his unique and somewhat controversial game Vantage.  It’s an open world, cooperative adventure game in which the players are interacting with different areas of the map and the level of assistance they can provide each other is limited.  Many love it, some wonder if there’s really a game there, but everyone talks about it and there’s no question that it’s one of the leading games of the year.  I fully expect it to get some award nomination love.  Origin Story is a tableau-building trick-taker themed around superheroes which has also been well received.  Jamey has made many contributions to the hobby over the years, so it’s a pleasure to welcome him to these pages, with the hope that it won’t be his last visit.

Dávid Turczi

• Star Trek: Captain’s Chair
• Keyside
• Thebai
• Perseverance: Castaway Chronicles – Episodes 3 & 4

Turczi’s designing career continues to grow by leaps and bounds.  He got his first DotY nomination two years ago and he’s back again with a very strong portfolio.  Captain’s Chair is the biggie, a 2-player asymmetric deck builder in which you play one of the iconic Trek captains and lead them to galactic glory.  It’s very complex, absolutely dripping in Trek theme, and has an appropriately sky-high Geek rating of 8.7.  Keyside is a heavyweight Key game in which you use different colored dice to activate the many abilities on the island’s harbors; it’s also been well received.  Thebai is a “T Game” from Board&Dice, where the players are trying to rebuild Thebes while holding off invaders.  It’s another heavyweight.  And finally, there’s the final release in the Perseverance series, a pair of standalone episodes based on an island with dinosaurs, which also has a very high rating.  It’s a great year for Dávid.  The question is, is it enough to make this master of the 1-player game the #1 designer of the year?

Martin Wallace

• Steam Power
• Aeterna
• Fighting Fantasy Adventures
• Cthulhu: Dark Providence
• Monster Rock

15 years ago, I rated Wallace as the dominant game designer in the world.  He had back-to-back DotY wins, followed by a couple of second place finishes, and was churning out quality games at a remarkable pace.  Since then, he’s quieted down quite a bit, but 2025 was one of his better recent years.  Steam Power is a middleweight train game, intended to be more accessible than Martin’s earlier railroad classics, and it’s done quite well.  Aeterna is an area majority game set in Ancient Rome in which you must deal with unrest in the Seven Hills.  Fighting Fantasy is a card game take on the old solitaire adventure books, while Cthulhu is a redesign of an earlier Wallace hit, A Study in Emerald.  It’s a solid group of games; not quite enough to give Martin a shot at his fourth DotY award, but it’s still good to see him back.

Alessandro Zucchini

• Toy Battle (i,F)
• Battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars

Zucchini is the co-designer, together with Paolo Mori, of these two highly rated games.  It’s the first appearance on the DotY pages for this veteran Italian designer and I hope to see more of him in future years.

Ralf zur Linde

• Tear-a-Part
• Coloro
• Biddle
• Brilliant
• Cookie Party
• Clickety Clack
• Komm zum Punkt
• Pura Vida
• What’s Next?!
• Schatz it: Junior
• Size Matters!
• Yingo
• Hier

We started with an “A” designer and finish up with a couple of “Z”s.  zur Linde has been designing games for over 30 years, many of them with the great Stefan Dorra.  But he’s never had a year like 2025.  13 designs!  Of course, most of these are very light, party-style games, which Ralf specializes in.  Titles like those don’t tend to get too much love from the Geek, but almost all of these have decent ratings.  Tear-a-Part has the active player ripping, crumbling, and twisting a small piece of paper to try to let the others guess the clue word.  Coloro is a 2-player abstract, where your move determines what your opponent can do.  Biddle lets players bid on how well they can roll dice, Yahtzee-style, while Brilliant is a roll-and-write where you race to fill in your grid.  The sheer number of titles is the main feature of this collection, but it’s still a nice group of games and enough to give zur Linde the first DotY nomination of his career.

So that’s all 15 nominees.  There are some fine years there, but honestly, as I started tabulating results, there really wasn’t much tension as far as which designer would walk away with the award.  So I’m very pleased to say that the Designer of the Year for 2025 is, once again…

REINER KNIZIA

I mean, what can you say?  33 freaking games, over half of them original, and many of them with very good ratings.  If another designer had had an amazing year, like, say, Simone Luciani had in 2023, I could see this being a joint award.  But no one managed to do anything like that last year, so Reiner cruises to his NINTH Designer of the Year award, with a truly dominant year.  As far as boardgames are concerned, it’s The Good Doctor’s world and the rest of us are just living in it.

Dávid Turczi has no reason to hang his head, though.  His excellent collection of games, led by Star Trek: Captain’s Chair, easily gives him a second place finish.  Matt Leacock finishes third, on the strength of Fate of the Fellowship, and Vital Lacerda grabs fourth place in his initial DotY appearance—he can celebrate with a legal drink.  Finally, fifth place goes to the Restoration Games team of Daviau, Jacobson, and Cohen.

So that was the year that was.  In twelve short months, I’ll be doing it again for 2026.  How will things shape up for that award?  Knizia seems to be unstoppable—could he possibly give us a three-peat and win his 10^th DotY award???  He might be the betting favorite, but there’s a ton of talented designers out there and, after 20 years of writing these articles, I know that plenty of strange things can happen.  The only way to find out is to check in with us again next year.  Until then, happy gaming!

 

 

Castle Nightingale

• Designers: Bruno Cathala, Eliette Fraile, Jeremy Fraile 
• Publisher: Sand Castle Games
• Players: 2
• Age: 10+
• Time: 20-30 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4aUdBDB
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Castle Nightingale looms out of the night, both intimidating and full of promise. Three ninjas have slipped inside, searching for the fabled treasure hidden within…yet a vigilant samurai patrols the halls, watching and listening for intruders.

 

Continue reading →

March 2026 Games I played for the first time this month, from worst to best, along with my ratings and comments.­ ­ Paint the Roses – 5/10­ Paint the Roses is a co-operative deduction game with a light Alice in Wonderland theme. Players will take turns placing flower tiles onto the board in an attempt to communicate information to the other players about their secret card. Correct guesses will advance the player along the scoring track, while incorrect guesses allow the Queen of Hearts to draw closer. Fill the whole garden board with flowers before the queen catches up in order to win the game. All of the information that can be deduced is publicly available to all players, which means player participation isn’t really mandatory. In some ways, it’s oddly disincentivized as well. When a player places a flower on the board, should you and the other two players who didn’t give the clue all independently race to sort out the implications? Or should you let the most-experienced, quickest-thinking player just tell you the conclusion? This is not really a typical co-op quarterbacking problem, it’s more a matter of slower-processing players feeling like they have nothing to contribute at all. It also needs to be said that Paint the Roses typifies a common complaint I level against co-operative games: that they are just group puzzles with some randomness added in. The co-ops I enjoy most fight against this tendency by giving each player their own responsibilities through hidden information or unique abilities and also masking the mechanical flaws through excellent narrative. This game does none of those things, which can at times give it all the thrill of watching someone else complete a sudoku. Paint the Roses is at its best when a player can cleverly place a flower tile in just the right way to share the maximum amount of information with the group. Those mind-meld moments can be thrilling. But more often than not, they are restricted by the available flower tiles. And the more often this occurs, the more the losses can feel totally out of the players’ control as well. Gamers looking for a peacefully-paced, cerebral experience may find something here to love, but it will be in spite of its flaws. ­­­ Fractured Sky – 6/10­ Fractured Sky is big on table appeal. Plastic airships cruise around the board, visiting various floating islands. Players outfit these ships behind their personal screens to ensure secrecy. Then the shards begin to fall from the sky. Sometimes you will know where, and other times you will only have an inkling, but since you win by gathering the most shards, you’ll want to pay attention here. This is an area majority game with tons of hidden information. There are mild deduction elements that can aid you in determining how much to commit to an area in order to win it, but in many cases you are basically just guessing at how strong your opponents are in each area. As a person who isn’t super keen on area majority anyway, this injection of additional chaos seems like a negative on the face of it. Despite this though, it’s hard not to be charmed by the overall experience, from the snappy flow of the turns to the luxurious magnetic components. Is it totally necessary for the secret value you assign to each airship to magnetically attach to the bottom of it? Of course not, but it does contribute positively to the overall experience. This is a fast-playing game, in the range of an hour or so, and that is definitely to its credit. Its whimsical and capricious nature could easily overstay its welcome otherwise. I get the impression that the designers of Fractured Sky think that it is deeper than it really is. Either that, or my single play just hasn’t revealed the depth. There are tips given about watching the other players’ moves more than the board, not over committing to too many places, etc. But it still felt like a game that you could end up firmly in last place by guessing one number away from the truth a few times. ­­­ Slay the Spire: The Board Game – 7/10­ It is a peculiar idea in many ways to create a tabletop game based on a video game. But Slay the Spire is better-suited than some because its gameplay was already based on tabletop game mechanics such as deckbuilding. In the video game, as here, you will start with a basic deck of cards that you use to battle ever-stronger creatures through a series of levels. After each battle, opportunities exist to improve your deck of cards; opportunities without which you would quickly find the battles impossible. Players will proceed through a series of three “acts”, each taking about an hour (and allowing for pausing the game between each one). Each act will have about four battles, culminating in a boss fight that is tougher than the previous ones. Between these battles are shops to buy new cards, places to heal, chances to remove weak cards from your deck, and story elements that add a touch of flavor to the world. If any player dies, the whole game is lost, so players need to utilize these interludes to find ways to defend and heal one another while also improving their own damage output. Having played the video game before, I had some concerns about the level of arithmetic previously offloaded to the CPU that would now instead be required of the human players of this tabletop version. Fortunately, the numeric values have been simplified and downscaled considerably. That’s not to say there aren’t calculations to do, but they are much more in line with what you might expect from a mid-weight tabletop game. Likewise, the administrivia of tracking monster health and whatnot is handled relatively painlessly. Slay the Spire: The Board Game also provides ample incentive for players to plot and scheme together, calculating the perfect sequence and role that each player should perform in order to ensure success. And it is this co-operation that helps justify purchasing and storing an enormous $125 cardboard box as opposed to downloading the app for $10. Solo play, while supported, seems like it would bypass much of the enjoyment on offer here. This is a solidly-designed co-operative deckbuilder that is sure to appeal to fans of similar efforts like Aeon’s End and Shadowrift. There are significant decisions in deck construction and character choice that will shape each play into a very different feel. Those solo decisions combined with the group decisions in execution lead to memorable plays that you can discuss even after the game is over. ­­­ Minos: Dawn of the Bronze Age – 8/10­ Minos: Dawn of the Bronze Age is a heavy-ish engine-building euro that leverages a fascinating dice mechanic and strong player interaction into a cohesive whole, albeit one pretty light on thematic resonance. Strap on your sandals ’cause we’re advancing up progress tracks and trading the Mediterranean. Minos has tons of different things going on, none of which are complex in and of themselves. But taken together they can make for a daunting teach, due solely to length. Fortunately, many of these are things you’ve likely seen before (track advancement, area majority, etc.). So let’s talk about the most innovative part of the game: the dice. Before each round, all the dice are rolled and then drafted by the players. When you draft a die, you also place it onto one of the action spaces on the board, planning out one of the actions you will take on your turn. The numbers on the dice serve three separate functions, so choosing the right one is crucial. Lower numbers are better, because the lowest number on each action space gets to take the best action there. But higher numbers are also better, because you get to add up your dice of the same color and if they total 9 or more, you get a free advancement on the track of the corresponding color (oh right, so color matters too). But sometimes you just need a good medium-size number, because you have to take the actions in order of your highest to lowest dice and often the sequencing of these actions is very important. The dice aspect of the game is very fun and honestly pretty flawless. Always a fascinating series of choices in quick succession. Unfortunately, the following execution of the actions themselves can be quite lengthy. For example, one of the spaces lets you take two cards into hand, which can be chosen from the faceup row or drawn randomly, then advance one of the tracks of your choice (another decision), the advancement of which triggers another bonus action, and then also trigger bonuses from your played cards that may generate further actions and bonuses. Chaining and comboing like this are definitely part of the game’s appeal, but you pay for it in overall game length. Yes, the primary complaint most people seem to have about Minos is how long it takes. The setup and rules are already rather protracted, and you’re looking at a couple hours of playing time at least on top of this. For this reason, most people recommend against playing Minos with its maximum four players, limiting it to only 2 or 3 unless you fancy delving into another whole rulebook to understand the solo mode. Those concerns may keep Minos from becoming an all-time classic, but if you have the time and patience there is still a lot here to like. ­­­ Stonesaga – 8/10 ­Video games have been doing “crafting systems” since forever. What happens if I combine this thing I found with this other thing I found? Surprise! But how to transfer that sense of surprise and discovery into board game form has been a tough nut to crack. First of all, because to be interesting it requires scads of different base components. Secondly, because it requires a way to make the results consistent but still surprising. And thirdly, because you need to spend many hours with the game to appreciate the depth of its crafting system, as a very simple one would lose all its wonder after the first game or two. Stonesaga has addressed all of these obstacles better than any other board game I’ve seen. Being a campaign legacy game allows players to spend the needed hours to see the depth of the system. Consistent yet surprising results are generated by a large book of lookup tables akin to Tales of the Arabian Nights or Vantage, pared with huge decks of mysterious cards. And, most creatively, the variety in base components is achieved by having each one having a different symbol on each of its sides. To craft, you put the symbols of two sides together, and look that up in the table. This essentially quadruples the possibilities without requiring more base components. Players will experiment with combining the same types of resource but in different configurations, a brilliant solution. Thematically, this is a game about cavemen trying to explore and survive in a harsh wilderness. The crafting elements are things like sticks and stones, with rarer elements like teeth being acquired only after fierce battles with predators. So while you’d probably like to sit around turn after turn just trying to craft with various configurations, time is of the essence. You can’t just keep putting a stick and a rock together without first finding food, water, and shelter unless you don’t mind dying. But even the acts of foraging and bivouacking can be exciting, with the lookup books also used to provide daring adventures with great rewards and costly consequences. The rating above is very preliminary, based on only a single play. But I can see what the game is trying to lead towards, and I’m very excited to see how well it sticks (and stones) the landing. This could definitely go up in rating when all is said and done. ­­­ A highly recommended game that I have most certainly played prior to this month, probably many times. ­ The Quest for El Dorado – 9/10­ The Quest for El Dorado combines two of my favorite types of game (racing and deckbuilding) into one beautifully elegant whole. Players will take on the role of explorers, hacking their way through endless jungles and deserts to be the first to find the City of Gold. The cards in your deck can be used either as a method of progressing through the board or as currency to buy even better cards to put in your deck. These choices are the real heart of the game, and they finding the right balance for yourself is crucial. Despite its short playing time, this game packs in a lot of high-level strategic decisions as well as low-level tactical ones. You can see the board setup at the start of the game (which can be randomized or chosen from literally hundreds of pre-made setups) and this will allow you to plan a general approach (e.g., I’ll need to buy lots of cards that let me cross water because I’m going to take the more direct river path). Your opponents could choose a completely different approach to the very same map (e.g., forget the river, I’ll go around it by buying much more efficient machete cards and hacking my way through). But the best laid plans require strong tactics to execute. When you start your turn next to the river with nary a paddle card in your hand, what then? Skip a turn of movement to buy more cards? Or adjust on the fly to an alternate route? This game is an absolute delight, and never seems to lose its luster for me. The options provided by the expansions make this even more true.

 

 

EXIT: Venice Conspiracy

• Designers: Inka and Markus Brand
• Publisher: Kosmos
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 12+
• Time: 1-2 hours
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4809sft

The EXIT series was one of the original puzzle-game franchises to hit the market when the escape room game craze took off a few years ago. To date, my family and I have been able to play all of the ones released here in the US, and this is a series that we continue to look forward to future installments. While there are many worthy competitors in the genre, the EXIT series is possibly the best known of the bunch – due in part to the initial set of games being awarded the 2017 Kennerspiel des Jahres award.

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