One of my favorite things to write about the last two years has been my favorite games from five years ago. With games released at an absolutely ridiculous pace these days, I’ve found it insightful to take a look. It’s helped me identify trends and play those out over time. It’s helped me think about games I’d nearly forgotten about. And most importantly, it reminds me about games I love, why I love them, and with whom I’ve played them.
This is the third year I’ve written this particular five-year retrospective, so the format might change. But if it’s a consistent format you’re looking for, you might have found the wrong newsletter. (Don’t go, though. I’m hopeful there’s something in here that escaped your attention on initial release.)
Four great roll-and-write games
Three of the very best roll-and-write games saw release in 2018, and while it’s not the year the genre made its debut, I think it’s the year it really came into prominence.
First up is That’s Pretty Clever, a pure roll-and-write that has you marking in five different sections of your sheet. Each section differs in strategy — some give you opportunities to chain together bonuses, while others will maximize your point total — giving you a lot of choices each round. This game focuses squarely on guiding you to increasingly clever decisions (hence the name) as you fill your sheet. Every time you take a die, all dice with lower numbers are unavailable to you this turn. It’s a great twist. One thing I really appreciate about this game: The player taking a turn gets a lot of choice on their action, while everyone else still gets some choice when it’s not their turn.
Railroad Ink is maybe my favorite of the four I’ll list here. It’s a network and route-building game where dice show different railroad and road shapes you’ll draw on your board. You earn points for building networks that exit the board at specific locations, and you’ll lose points for networks that lead nowhere. Much like the original Pokemon games when they arrived in the U.S., you can get this one in both blue and red varieties. (Perhaps not coincidentally, you can also get them in green and yellow in the sequel-expansion set, Railroad Ink Challenge.) Adding just a little bit more to this one is a variety of expansion content, which add a lot of variety to the game but also alter the mechanical experience pretty considerably.
If you’ll digress with me for just a moment here: Roll-and-write doesn’t have to literally mean dice are involved in gameplay. The way I see it, rolling in the context of some games can refer to the “roll of the dice,” a metaphor used widely to describe randomized events. (Or, more acutely, it can reference taking a chance on a low-probability event, but that still has dice being used metaphorically.) So when I talk about a game in which you’re flipping cards or otherwise involving yourself a randomized event, then marking on a board or card, I’m going to call them roll-and-writes.
Welcome To is a roll-and-write game in which you flip cards in sets with actions and house numbers. You’ll fill in your board with those house numbers, advancing numerically from left to right, with no house numbers being written multiple times in a given row. (If you’ve played Qwixx — which is a great one — this is sort of like that but with a strong neighborhood theme.) It’s a really nice little game, and you can play huge numbers of players. Great stuff!
Finally, Let’s Make a Bus Route is a Japanese roll-and-write in which everyone’s making bus routes on a combined board. You’ll earn points for passengers and the areas they visit. It’s not overly tense, but there’s plenty of clever play to be had. It’s been rebranded as Get on Board, which is pretty widely available in the U.S., so you can pretty easily give this one a spin.
Honorable mentions:
Roll to the Top, a number-stacking roll-and-write that’s been republished by Allplay recently
MetroX, another recently-republished network-building roll-and-write. (I wonder if I could have fit a few more hyphens in that sentence.)
Four great games for families
The Quacks of Quedlinburg is one of my favorite games I’ve played, full stop. It’s a game in which you’re all witch doctors trying to make the best potions while not exploding. It’s a terribly clever press-your-luck game in which the primary mechanic is bag-building, and I absolutely love it. In fact, I wrote about just that in 2022 in Why I love The Quacks of Quedlinburg.
Cryptid is a deduction game in which everyone’s searching for cryptozoological beasts — think Sasquatch, the Loch Ness Monster, that sort of thing. Everyone has clues of their own, and everyone’s trying to reveal honest — but perhaps a little misleading — information.
Century: Eastern Wonders is a nice family-weight pick-up-and-deliver game. Designed by Emerson Matsuuchi, it’s one of three games in the Century series, each of which takes a common game mechanic and distills it into something really approachable. I’ve played Merchants of Venus and had a really great time, but if I want to play a pick-up-and-deliver game that takes less than an hour to play, I’m going for this one. (Or maybe Explorers of the North Sea, which is also great but just a little bit more involved.)
Hardback is one of those games you get your Scrabble-loving mom because she always beats you (a true story, although it might have been Paperback, now that I think about it). It’s a deck-building-word-building game from Tim Fowers and Jeff Beck, and it’s just a delight. It’s a quick-to-pick-up deck-builder, and while I love the whole series of games, this might be the one I’d take to play with family. (A side note: I love Paperback Adventures, which is probably not a great game for families, given it’s a largely solo game.)
Some honorable mentions include…
Reef, a tense tile-laying game that seems like it might actually be friendly — but isn’
Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig, another tile-laying game that combines two good games into one also-good-but-a-little-weird game
Azul — Stained Glass of Sintra, an Azul spin-off that’s a nice variation on the now-classic Azul
Four great strategy games
Root is one of the games from 2018 with great staying power. It’s an asymmetric game of forest domination. Its theme is cute and a bit fluffy, but it hides a strategic, meaty interior. That theme has been a huge draw for so many, but the game is so much more than that. Each player role has a unique approach to the game; each combination of roles produces a different experience.
Architects of the West Kingdom is a worker placement game that I found very charming. It’s got a rulebook that is both easy to read and easy to scan, and the symbology on the board is clear. Of course, there’s a fun game here, too — I love more than just how easy it is to read the board. There are a few great things about this one; you can hire apprentices that make your future actions even better, and some action spaces get better as you place more workers there. It’s a lot of little things in this game that make it — to my mind — a great next-step worker placement game.
Obsession is a worker placement game set in Victorian England, and the whole thing is just dripping with that theme, which is frankly a little unusual for a game like this. In that way, it’s pretty remarkable. You play as the head of an estate, and the idea of sending out your workers to do tasks of various sorts is just, well, real life. I don’t know. Neat game, though.
Brass: Birmingham is currently the top-ranked game on BoardGameGeek, overtaking Gloomhaven for that crown. And as you’d expect from a number-one ranked game on the site, there’s a lot going on here. It’s essentially a train game, in that you’re building networks of railroads, managing a complex economy, and a whole lot more.
Some honorable mentions include:
Key Flow, a card-driven worker placement game in the Key series
Gùgōng, a worker placement game set in 16th century China
Teotihuacan, a rondel game set in the ancient Aztec city
Four great cooperative and team games
Now Boarding is the second Tim Fowers game on this list, and it’s a real treat. It’s a real-time cooperative game in which each player plays as an airline. Succeed by getting passengers from an airport to their destination, fail by letting too many passengers grow frustrated at an airport. It hits just the right point in a real-time game, because you’ll feel like you’re rushed during a round, and like you have time to plan between them. But that planning may not be what you need, because there are new passengers showing up all the time.
The Mind made a huge splash upon its initial release, largely because the concept seems so foreign. In this game, the third on the list designed by Wolfgang Warsch after That’s Pretty Clever and The Quacks of Quedlinburg, the concept is extremely simple: Cooperatively, you and your fellow players will play cards in ascending order. That’s it. That’s what you’re doing. There’s even only one restriction — and that’s that you can’t talk. At all. And you can’t otherwise communicate. The Mind feels like a meditation around intentional non-verbal communication and how you can’t actually remove that from a situation, but it also feels like a meditation on what makes a game. Pretty neat game, truly.
Decrypto is a team game in which two teams compete to try to deliver encoded messages corresponding to a series of words — but the other team is busy trying to intercept those messages. Those messages consist of one-word clues for each of the digits in the code, which map back to words visible to only the active team. It’s a lovely twist on classic word-deduction games.
Just One is another word game, but this one’s totally cooperative. Each round, one player will draw a card without looking at it, which gives everyone else the word for the round. Everyone secretly writes a word that acts as a clue to the chosen word, but if anyone around the table has written the same word as another player, those words are cancelled out. It’s a simple party game, but two factors really elevate this one. First, there just aren’t that many cooperative party games, and what’s better than having fun together in that setting? Second, the uniqueness rule adds a creative element that changes the feeling of the game significantly, making paths to proper word selection less straightforward.
Several honorable mentions follow, because there were a number of great cooperative and team games released in 2018:
Trapwords is a team-based word game (funny, that) with a twist on the classic Taboo — except the opposing team chooses the trap words
Chronicles of Crime is a great cooperative crime-solving game
Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game earns automatic points for a really long title that tells you exactly what it is
Sprawlopolis is an 18-card cooperative city building game, in which you earn points by following randomized sets of rules — it’s spawned two sequels, Agropolis and Naturopolis, as well as a number of small expansions.
Pandemic: Fall of Rome, the third distinct spin-off in the Pandemic series (after Iberia and Rising Tide), which features an interesting play on the march of the enemy (in this case, not a disease)
Read more of my five-year retrospectives:
I hope this latest edition of Don’t Eat the Meeples has found you well! I thought I’d share this little photo of my baby and me as I worked on this newsletter. He’s pretty great, but wouldn’t you know, he just doesn’t play many games yet.
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