It seems to have happened so often in the last little while. I play something that wasn’t great, look it up later on BGG when I’m writing my snapshot, see it has 3 or more designers and I immediately jump to imagining either:

• a bunch of friends around a table who cobbled something together and got it to a point where it was ok enough to be published, or self-published, or
• it started off with fewer designers, had issues, and they kept adding people to try and improve things, and got it to a point where it was ok enough, but …

Now there are exceptions of course. There always are. I love Revive for one. You’ll have others. Doesn’t matter. Let me proffer Alison’s Game Radar Guideline #1: if a game has 3+ designers, approach with caution. Your gaming will feel safer for it.

New-to-me games played recently include …

CENTURY: GOLEM EDITION – EASTERN MOUNTAINS (2019): Rank 1678, Rating 7.3

Same 6 rating and comment as the other Centuries, being pleasant but not riveting given it’s a constant grind of converting one resource into another until the game is done by someone fulfilling enough big contracts. This one does away with conversion cards and instead your mission is to move around the board getting out as many huts onto map hexes (which provide the conversion powers) asap – the huts give you VPs and upgrades which allow you to zoom around the board quicker (amongst other things) which allow you to quicken and optimise your conversions. It’s ok for the occasional play but nothing I’d request.

Rating: 6

COPY CAT MEOW (2023): Rank N/a, Rating N/a

A little Japanese Llama-type game. If you can play the same number (1-11) as the previous player, they give you a VP and you don’t have to draw – you’re closer to shedding your hand. If you can’t, draw a card. if you think you have the lowest score in hand, call round over (big penalties if you don’t, big scores if you do) otherwise play a number and start a new round. Once we got into the swing this was a bit of fun, but as group-think set in with the big cards going first, keeping the little cards, each player who called round-over lost big-time and it quickly proved improbable given you have to draw beforehand, making the game a little one-dimensional and strictly draw-dependent.

Rating: 6

 ki

KING OF TOKYO: DUEL (2024): Rank 4077, Rating 7.3

It’s the same game-play as the original – roll to get hits, health, buy cards, trigger powers – but now there’s a board with 2 tracks you can move along which provides alternate win conditions. I prefer it over the original as the turns come faster and there’s no debate over who you’re hitting. Games can be over quick if you get lucky with rolls that lean into your superpower so it’s just a bit of random fun while you’re waiting for other people on game night but it does it well.

Rating: 7

PIRATES OF MARACAIBO (2023): Rank 1025, Rating 8.0 – Pfister et al

I’m a big fan of Maracaibo and this delivers the same system in a more streamlined manner. In the original you’re getting cards for icons as much as their effects and you’re forever churning them. Here you sail across an ever changing ocean of cards (instead of a fixed board), either landing on cards you can buy and are then replaced (for immediate and/or ongoing effects) or on islands to get upgrades (immediate or ongoing effects) and a base action – typically either a raid (which is now dice rolls to earn VP-earning treasures … we’re pirates after all) or move along the exploration track (which is much the same). Play 3 rounds instead of 4. Nice and clean, more accessible. It’s engaging to assess the card ocean and develop a plan, and fun to explore different VP approaches that result. There are different variant modules to try for variety. I can see why there’s much love around for this version. I loved it.

Rating: 8

SANKORE: THE PRIDE OF MANSA MUSA (2024): Rank 2336, Rating 8.0

The rulebook is actually quite good but the game-play is so unusual (in a good way!) and the implications and effects of what you’re doing so unknown to begin with that even after 17 hours of rule study I had no idea how to play well. Thankfully it becomes more intuitive the further you get into it but no doubt it’s a barrier to entry. At heart it’s an area-majority game but you’ll only get 10 or so pieces on the board and there are 16 areas. You’ll win stuff just because no one else goes there so you tend to choose places for the right-now resources rather than the majority rewards. The big rewards in each area are difficult to earn without planning (my tech tree needs to look like this, I need to advance my students up the tech tree like this, and I need those resources so I need to do this other thing first) so there’s an attraction to mastering that and making it organic rather than processional. All good so far. Lots to explore, great decisions every turn. My concern is the nature of the scoring. You accumulate prestige tokens in 4 colours, and each colour will be worth usually 2-3 (but maybe 1 or 4) pts each depending on how the players place the coloured resources they spend on the scoring tracks (which is another form of area majority). While you can see where things are heading and invest in the seeming big scoring colours (or work to change things), it’s tight enough that one placement made by someone not thinking it through can flip results for other players, which is outside their control. It’s possible that the last player of the game can flip things as well, which seems overly arbitrary given the effort made to otherwise play smartly. Still, it has allure. Oh, and props for the theming – it’s nice to be taken somewhere different.

Rating: 7

KRONOLOGIC: PARIS 1920 (2024): Rank 3405, Rating 7.5

Cluedo-style elimination of suspects, locations and timeframes (there are 6 of each) until you have the solution. There’s a clever system of asking about 2 things which reveals information about the third (eg how many suspects were on the staircase at 2pm) some of which is shared (so you’re learning things on other turns which is good), some of which is private. The clever wibble is that (in the one we played at least) each suspect must move to an adjacent room each hour so you can eliminate a ton of stuff along the way by tracking suspect movements. The problem is there’s a fixed solution and only so many cases (which affects replay) and when someone stumbles into something which is close, suddenly everyone’s there – you don’t have to eliminate everything to get to the solution. So, like most deduction games I play these days, I felt I was going through the motions of elimination without a lot of interest in the result, hoping to stumble into truth. Much like a previous life really.

Rating: 6

NASI LEMAK (2023): Rank N/a, Rating N/a

A Malaysian design with the aim of collecting all 5 Nasi Lemak ingredients in hand and play them to collect a scoring card. We played with the Rendang (mmm) expansion which adds wild cards and some other wibbles. Well-trodden territory. There are a few questionable design decisions however. Each turn you draw 2 cards. If you draw ingredients instead of action cards (steal ingredients, pay fewer ingredients to cook, etc) then it’s likely you’ll have lost them by next turn and there’s no solution except draw better and get actions. You get to perform three actions on your turn … but if you don’t draw actions, you can’t use them. Why is one scoring card worth double another for exactly the same effort? And the game feels interminable when you’re forever giving cards away to other people. As you may have gathered, I was a little burnt on this one.

Rating: 3

THE RICH AND THE GOOD (2008): Rank 1528, Rating 7.2

Old school Euro. Buy or sell in the 6 types of stocks. Play cards from racks shared with your neighbours to manipulate stock prices – meaning you’ve got half the known knowledge on how the stock prices will move. Repeat 8 times, trying to keep enough money to buy stuff that goes cheap, sell when high, watch what other people are buying and jump on board before it moves and so on. The wibble is that the player who donates the least money to charity (in the form of stocks) cannot win. It does what it’s trying to do well but it’s JASE, too vanilla, and too repetitive for much replay.

Rating: 6

Thoughts of other Opinionated Gamers:

Larry:  I’m actually a big fan of the original Century game (Spice Road) and have a very good win rate with it.  I don’t find the resource conversions to be a grind, but to be a lot of fun with a clear objective.  Then again, I “see” how this game works, so that probably affects my rating a lot.

King of Tokyo?  Zzzzzzz.

And I agree with you about Pirates of Maracaibo.  I think it and the original Maracaibo are pretty different and I like them both, but Pirates has a better chance of getting to the table and, overall, is probably the better game.  It’s unusual that I prefer redesigns, so my feelings for it are notable.

Mark Jackson: Actually liked King of Tokyo: Duel – for exactly that filler reason.

Pirates of Maracaibo is a splendid redesign of good but exhausting “heavy” game that keeps all of the good stuff and streamlines it down. (I’m curious to see if GWT: El Paso will do the same for the GWT franchise.)