Board games of 2013

Prosperity was co-designed by Reiner Knizia and Sebastian Bleasdale. While Dr. In spite of that, I was afraid this game was going to be a too-abstract tile-laying game not to my tastes. Boy was I wrong! It manages to hit that magical middle-weight game category, that packs a lot of very interesting decisions in a playing time of an hour or less.

Unlike other simpler games, Bruxelles presents the player with a myriad of choices. It falls a bit in the camp of a Feldian point-salad game, but where each action and choice is very interconnected to the rest of the actions and the state in the board. You want to do action A, but if you do action B before, then A will be a lot more efficient. But of course, if you do C, then B will be even more powerful.

Those kind of tough choices elevate this game to the top of my games. Maybe even more interesting than looking at the list itself, is to look at what those games have in common. I have fairly varied tastes in games, but all the games in this list have some strong common elements:.

Good collection of games.. Wonderful collection, i love to play those games. Besides those social aspects, the gameplay is solid and the components were of high quality. Zombicide Season 2 filled the Left 4 Dead void that was in my heart. Regarding the honorable mentions, two games made the cut and honestly, they could both be part of the top five.

Sushi Go! The cute artwork of Sushi Go! Forbidden Desert followed the theme of as it re-implemented Forbidden Island and did so in a way that almost made Island obsolete. Just a guy that wants to talk about board games more than his significant other tolerates. View all posts by Two off the Top. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account.

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Twitter Instagram. Without further ado, lets look at However, all players will lose if the islands' natives rise up in a violent uprising. Each turn sees players theoretically working together to manage crises in a manner that'll be familiar to anyone who's played the excellent Battlestar Galactica game, and failing at this will cause local unrest.

Should one of you fail to employ enough locals, or perhaps go the other way and enslave them, it'll similarly destabilise the area. Which might be fine. Because there's always the possibility that one player in Archipelago will be the sympathiser, and will win if there's an uprising. That's an interesting political dynamic in and of itself, but when you add in area control and free trading between players? The game just takes off. I built the bloody churches that are keeping us safe!

Like Space Cadets: Dice Duel, it's not just that Archipelago is innovative, polished or entertaining. It's that it has a whip-smart design that's had every single rough edge taken off. Perhaps people aren't wrong, then, to think of Archipelago as a stereotypical nerdy board game: It possesses everything that's awesome about the hobby. It's incredibly smart, absolutely gorgeous, and the island, tech and troubles reshuffle themselves utterly for a different game every time you play. This tiny game of just 15 cards arrived in an avalanche of hype this year, so I knew what to expect.

Coup is an intense game of bluffing, with players working their "influence" or alleged influence with five different court members in a deadly game of call-my-bluff.

What I wasn't expecting is for it to be so funny, because of one very simple rule I was missing. Players in Coup are clawing their way towards having enough money to launch a titular coup, stripping another player of one of their face-down cards. Lose both cards, and you're out of the game. Let's say that on your turn you claim that one of your two cards is the Duke, letting you take three coins. You lose a card—half of your "life"—if another player calls bullshit on you and you were lying.

But that's not all. The rule I was missing is that if they're wrong , they lose half their life. Coup, you see, isn't just a game where to stay alive, players have to become enormous gas bags composed entirely of puff and bluff.

It's a game where your friend sat opposite might know, in their heart of hearts, that you're full of shit, but can't bring themselves to call you on it because of the terrible consequences. A lovely, accessible, razor-sharp game, with a lovely, compact, tiny container.