Players are indeed competing to make the surface of our neighbor planet habitable for humans, laying ocean tiles, planting greenery, and playing building cards for points, all while their actions raise the planet’s surface temperature and oxygen levels. Terraforming Mars was the best high strategy game of 2016, despite its title and the fact that it’s based on one of the most boring novels I’ve ever read. You can set up the game to keep it light and simple, or use cards from sets like Dominion: Intrigue, which includes cards that let you do unpleasant things to your opponents, to make it as cutthroat as you want. There are at least ten expansions available, so it has huge replay value, and each additional set of cards presents new possibilities for strategy. There are money cards, points cards (worthless until game-end, until which point they’re just getting in your way), and action cards that might allow you to draw more cards or claim more money or trash a card from your deck. When you exhaust your deck, you shuffle your discard pile and start over.
$50, Available on Amazon.Īnother great ‘gateway’ game, Dominion has become a best seller across the world and given rise to a whole new genre of board-less games called “deckbuilders.” In it, you are indeed gathering cards to build a deck, and on each turn, you draw five cards, play what you can from your hand, buy one or more new cards, and discard everything from that turn. The game has numerous expansions that add tile types, more powerful meeples, and different scoring twists, and the iOS app is still the best board game app out there. The strategy is in the scoring: You get points for roads and cities you control (meaning you have more meeples on them than any other opponent), and through clever tile placement and meeple management you can secure unclaimed areas to score points for structures you didn’t help build. Carcassonne is a tile-laying game with no board you build the board, so to speak, as you go, drawing from a bag of unplayed tiles and placing new ones adjacent to the tiles on the board, lining up roads or cities as permitted, and sometimes placing one of your wooden tokens, called “meeples,” to claim areas. The best Eurogame out there is Carcassonne, in large part because its rules are simple and turns are quick, but there’s a world of strategy within it, including a high degree of interaction with your opponents. Catan is very good, but its importance in board game history exceeds its actual value as a game, and because it can take quite a while to play, it’s never my first suggestion for folks new to the hobby. Whether you’re looking for accessible, all-ages options for a post-dinner family session, or new challenges to explore with gaming-minded friends during your holiday break, here are 14 titles worth clearing the table for.Įveryone will tell you to start with Catan (formerly known as Settlers of Catan), which is the best-selling Eurogame ever, and the one most responsible for the size of the market and the hobby.
in full, with an array of engaging titles appearing on the shelves at Target and Barnes & Noble as well as at specialty retailers online and across the country. The board game renaissance that started in Germany over 20 years ago, which spurred a cascade of games now called German-style or Eurogames, has reached the U.S. Board games are relatively trendy right now, though not the sorts that your parents had on the top shelf of the coat closet, like the interminable Monopoly or that useless word memorization game Scrabble.
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