The winners of the Meeples Choice Awards for the 2024 calendar year have been announced.  The voters’ three favorite games from last year are:

BOMB BUSTERS
ENDEAVOR: DEEP SEA
SETI

The votes for all three of the games were clustered closely together.  Finishing 2 votes back of the winning games were Civolution and The Gang, with The Fellowship of the Ring Trick Taking Game one vote behind those two.  Harmonies, Let’s Go! To Japan, Slay the Spire, and Tales of the Arthurian Knights made up the rest of the top 10.

Congratulations to the designers of the winning games:  Hisashi Hayashi, Carl de Visser/Jarratt Gray, and Tomas Holek.  This is the second MCA award for both Hayashi (who won in 2016 for Yokohama) and the de Visser and Gray team (the original Endeavor won all the way back in 2009).  On the other hand, SETI is not only Holek’s first MCA win, it’s more or less his first published game (he released his first three games last year at Essen).  Congratulations go as well to the games’ publishers:  Cocktail Games, the partnership of Burnt Island Games and Grand Gamers Guild, and Czech Games Edition.

15 Opinionated Gamers enter, 1 expansion wins.  What is the best board game expansion ever?  It’s time to find out.

Adam, Alison, Ben, Craig, Doug, Fraser, Joe, Jonathan, Larry, Mark, Matt, RJ, Ryan, Steph, and Talia voted on their favorite expansions of all time.  There were 82 different expansions that received votes, but only 20 can emerge victorious as our collective Top 20 expansions.

Do your favorite expansions appear on our list below?  If not, what are your favorites and why?  Most of the expansions that I voted for did not make the cut, but it’s still a fascinating list with some obvious picks and some definite head-scratchers.  So come with us on this journey through the aggregate favorites of this motley crew.

20) Dominion: Prosperity and Terraforming Mars: Colonies [**TIE**]

Tied in 20th place we have Dominion Prosperity from 2010 and Terraforming Mars: Colonies from 2018.  Both of these received votes from four people, including a bronze medal for Dominion: Prosperity from Matt, and a bronze medal for Terraforming Mars: Colonies from Fraser.  Neither of these appeared on my list.  I was too busy being the only person to vote for Root: Riverfolk, which adds the joyous lizards and crafty otters.  The OG has previously published A Guided Tour of Expanding Mars, where I talked about my enjoyment of Colonies, and we compiled How Do You Terraform about the many approaches and philosophies to experiencing that game, so it’s clearly a topic of interest to many OG members, but to put these in the Top 20 of all-time came as a surprise to me personally.

19) 7 Wonders: Armada

19th place goes to 7 Wonders: Armada from 2018, but the last time that I played 7 Wonders was in 2011, long before this so-called Armada was released.  Armada received a bronze medal from Steph, so you’ll have to ask her why it’s better than my beloved Neuroshima Hex: Dancer expansion, which was another expansion that no one else besides me voted for.  The Dancer faction creates such fascinating and compelling decision-making points both for the player controlling this brilliant expansion and for the player fighting back against this bizarre triad of foes. What came in 18th? Keep reading to find out!

Corps of Discovery

• Designer: Jay Cormier + Sen-Foong Lim
• Publisher: Off the Page Games
• Players: 11-4
• Age: 14+
• Time: 45-75 min
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4kjjigT
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Lewis and Clark are tasked not only with exploring America, but with ridding the land of numerous invasive monsters that have appeared. Corps of Discovery: A Game Set in the World of Manifest Destiny is a co-operative deduction game in which players each take the role of one of the crew on the expedition and set out to explore the land. The game board allows for different maps to be inserted into it, so you have many adventures ahead of you.

In addition to finding and killing monsters, you must also complete numerous daily challenges that require specific resources that you can find on the board. You have to use logic and deduction to reason out where the resources you need are located. Ally yourselves with Sacajawea and the indigenous people of the area to help you on your quest.  The game comes with two chapters: Fauna and Flora. Each has new mechanisms, a different goal, and new components to give each chapter a different feel.

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Please Don’t Burn My Village!

• Designer: Simon Weinberg
• Publisher: Fireside games
• Players: 2-5
• Age: 10+
• Time: 20 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3F8cZ0p
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

A fearsome dragon is threatening to burn all the villages in the kingdom! Luckily dragons are greedy, so if you can bribe him with treasures from the battlefield like a barbarian’s axe or a phoenix feather, you might persuade him to spare your village. Unfortunately, other villagers in the kingdom have the same idea…

In Please Don’t Burn My Village!, which is set in the world of Castle Panic, you want to bribe with the right treasure at the right time to keep the dragon’s attention — while buying treasures at the black market and cursing the other villagers’ treasures. When no treasure remains, the dragon will burn all of the villages except one. Will yours be the one that survives?

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Lure

• Designer: Satoru Nakamura
• Publisher: Allplay
• Players: 2-5
• Age: 7+
• Time: 15 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3Syyiv3
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Welcome to the world of competitive fishing! Will you play aggressively and use fewer dice? Or, will you count on your opponents to be too risky? Let’s fish!  In Lure, players compete to collect the most points by reeling in fish cards. To catch a fish, players roll their dice to beat the fish’s target number, as well as meet any specific requirements on the card. Whoever completes those requirements and is closest to the target catches the fish!  Players secretly bid on how many dice to use before the round starts. Bid less dice to go first, but use more dice to make it easier to catch.  Most points wins after the deck of fish cards runs out!

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