Wyrmspan, River Valley Glassworks and Nocturne: Three great 2024 board games

These three designs from 2024 highlight some trends in board gaming.

2024 has been a tremendous year for board games. I think I say that every year, and if we’re being honest, I do think it’s always a great year for board games. There are so many new designs and new ideas making it to the table, with games pushing the hobby in new and interesting directions. There’s always something pushing boundaries and prompting us to think about what it means to be a game.

These three games are among the best I’ve played in 2024: Wyrmspan is a medium-weight spin on Wingspan, and it plays as a distinct, interesting game all its own; River Valley Glassworks hits that Azul-like mark with clean, simple play and colorful pieces; and Nocturne marks another success in the Flatout Games canon with lovely art in a neat little puzzle of a game.

Wyrmspan | Photo by Matt Montgomery

Wyrmspan

Lots of publishers release sequels. Think about Azul and the three-plus sequels it’s spawned (Queen’s Garden, Stained Glass of Sintra, and Summer Pavilion.) The games are all good, and they have a common connection of tile drafting and pattern building. I think you could release each individually under a different name, and nobody would really think twice. (Of course, they would not sell nearly as well, and I think that tells a story of its own.) 

Think, too, about the Forbidden series: Island, Desert, Sky and Jungle. The Matt Leacock-designed games are similar thematically, but aside from moving around a grid, the games are not overly similar. The connection isn’t exactly tenuous, but if you rethemed the games, they would seem perhaps to speak with a similar design vocabulary, but they would seem a lot less like a connected universe. Moreover, it feels like each game could lead to the next in complexity — by the time you’ve mastered Forbidden Island, you’re likely ready for Forbidden Desert, and that path continues.

Wyrmspan, the sequel to the hit game Wingspan, takes its own unique approach to the sequel concept. As a sequel, Wyrmspan not only speaks with a similar voice, but it fully adopts significant parts of the game. The player boards are similar, you’re still collecting eggs, and the round scoring from a randomized selection feels like a direct evolution. You’re still working to build an engine, adapt tactically to the cards you have available, and meet a variety of scoring conditions that shift over the game’s four rounds.

But as much as Wyrmspan looks and feels like Wingspan, Wyrmspan is something more, which isn’t to say it’s a better game, but it’s certainly a more complex game. Often sequels are geared toward the same audience with which they started, with some small ramps in complexity added to the mix. Where Wingspan was reasonably accessible to new gamers and became a runaway hit, selling over 2 million copies, Wyrmspan feels far more focused on the core gaming audience that knows Stonemaier Games. It’s closer to, say, Viticulture (still being a bit lower in weight, though) than it is to the typical runaway hit.

In that way, Wyrmspan isn’t truly aimed at the same market as Wingspan. It hits at a slice of that market, but it’s not the largest slice. That’s down to a few more intertwined mechanisms than the original, giving the game that feeling great roll-and-writes do so well: Your actions lead to bonuses, which can lead to more actions. There’s also a reduced sense of randomness with card draws. Even though the deck of cards (dragons instead of birds, in this case) remains huge and extremely unwieldy to shuffle, it feels more like there’s a reduced interdependency solely on a good card draw.

I might end up talking about this game in more depth — I’d like to — because the way it splits off from Wingspan is really interesting. Wyrmspan isn’t overly complex, but it’s just enough to push the game into a slightly different sphere than its predecessor. That fascinates me.

Designed by Connie Vogelmann, developed by Elizabeth Hargrave (Wingspan’s designer) and published by Stonemaier Games.

River Valley Glassworks | Photo courtesy of Allplay

River Valley Glassworks

There’s a very specific type of abstract game hitting the market these days, owing in large part to the success of 2017’s runaway hit Azul. River Valley Glassworks is one of the latest hot games in that style, with colorful, chunky pieces, a simple premise, and depth that unfolds as you play.

Let’s take a sidebar about Azul’s success and why it’s spawned so many potential successors: Each turn is simple, and you’re fulfilling simple goals. You’re picking a set of colored tiles from a factory, placing the rest in the middle, and choosing a queue on your board to which you’ll add the tiles. (To continue a tangent: Azul is much simpler if you think of it as a game of filling queues.) You get points for completing rows, columns, and sets of colors. It’s a game that you could teach in a matter of minutes, but it’ll take a bit longer than that to really be successful. That’s a key element: Azul is a game in which you can improve your ability, but you don’t have to be good to be moderately successful.

River Valley Glassworks is very much a game in that mold. The premise is simple (and adorable): You’re playing as an anthropomorphic animal collecting pieces of glass of various colors tumbling down a river. Some of those colors are more common, and some are more rare. You’ll earn points for collecting lots of glass, and especially for collecting lots of rare glass.

The river is made up of a length of tiles, each of which starts with some glass pieces on it. To collect pieces of glass, you’ll place glass from your inventory on one river tile, then you’ll collect from one of the two adjacent tiles.

After collecting glass tiles, you’ll place them on your personal board, which is divided into rows and columns. Each column can hold only one type of glass, and each can only hold a limited number of glass pieces. Once you’ve placed glass of a specific color in a column, it can only go in that column. If you collect more glass than you can fit, it’ll go in an overflow area, and overflow pieces are worth negative points.

At the end of the game, you’ll score points for your two columns with the most pieces, with the left-most (and lowest-scoring) columns taking priority over ones further to the right. You’ll also earn points for how completed your rows are, starting from the bottom and proceeding upward. If there’s an empty space moving from left to right, you’ll score for the row up to the empty space. River Valley Glassworks is essentially about optimizing those rows and columns.

I’ve really enjoyed my plays, which have all been on BoardGameArena, but it’s also entered a wider release already, and you can find it in at least one big box retailer. It really does feel poised to land with a bigger splash than most of Allplay’s previous efforts, and in that way, it feels almost like a culmination of a strategic push.

Allplay is releasing games that generally are accessible to a wide swathe of players, and they’ve had some real success stories among those efforts. The perennially weird auction game QE, the pro-wrestler-sumo-bug game Kabuto Sumo, and the long-awaited Reiner Knizia reprint Through the Desert stand as exemplars — but River Valley Glassworks holds perhaps their best chance at wider success yet.

Designed by Adam Hill, Ben Pinchback and Matt Riddle. Published by Allplay.

Nocturne | Photo by Matt Montgomery

Nocturne

Nocturne is one of the latest releases from Flatout Games, the collaborative behind the runaway success Calico, Cascadia, Point Salad, Fit to Print, and a few other games. It’s perfectly in-line with what they’ve established as their house style. Flatout Games have strong thematic underpinnings, but they could conceivably exist with another theme and remain equally compelling. From Flatout Games’ website: “We love puzzly games with simple rules, high replayability, and great tension and decision-making, typically with low-luck, high-skill euro-style mechanisms.”

Nocturne, as with so many of their designs, is quick to teach. It holds a nice amount of depth, and it captures a specific feeling with the game’s art — seriously, the art in Nocturne from Beth Sobel, one of the best artists in board games today, is perfect.

If I had to write a short description of how Nocturne plays, setting aside the specifics and focusing instead on broad strokes, there is no chance I could write something better than what Flatout themselves have said. Of course, we should talk more about Nocturne, but understanding the broad strokes will do us some good as we think about it.

In Nocturne, you play as fox mystics collecting enchanted items by casting spells. In order to collect items, you must battle against your opponents to see whose spell is strongest. You’ll do this by playing discs on a grid — which, when you put it that way, makes it sound a bit dry and abstract. It’s not — though you are, in essence, playing a little bit of an abstract strategy element when you’re playing your spells.

On their turn, players cast spells by placing discs of increasing value until one player wins, either because they can’t be beaten, or because every other player has passed. They’ll be played to a grid of item tiles, and each subsequent disc must be placed orthogonally adjacent to the last disc placed. After every other player passes, either by choice or necessity, the player who played the strongest spell gets the item upon which their spell is placed. You’ll repeat that until every player is out of spells.

As your spells are played on the grid, the available space for your spells will decrease. Say there’s a magical item you’d like to collect, but you know you won’t be able to play a stronger spell than somebody else going for the same spell — you might turn in a direction that will prevent other players from reaching that item this turn, or you might play one of your lower numbers on the item, which could save the item from being picked up this time — but it might rule you out of picking it up, too. You’ll have the opportunity to lock other players into a smaller area as you position your spells, and that’s the real heart of this game.

Under that layer of play, you’ll earn points for the items you’ve collected. You might pick up skulls, which are worth points printed on their cards, or you could pick up herbs, mushrooms, or feathers, each of which presents a scoring opportunity for sets; you might find yourself drawn to mysterious eggs, which give players more points for having the most eggs. Or, perhaps you’ll pick up cursed treasure chests — those let you pick draw tiles from the deck, keeping one, but that chest is worth negative points at the game’s end.

Nocturne isn’t a complicated game. It’s in essence a beautifully illustrated set collection game with a cool spellcasting game being played to collect tiles. I don’t think it quite hits the heights of some of Flatout Games’ very, very best, but it’s a solid showing with some nice staying power, and it’s an excellent addition to their already-impressive canon.

Designed by David Iezzi, published by Flatout Games.

Five more games from 2024 I’m excited to play

• Cascadero is a Reiner Knizia tile-laying game (swoon) that I’m having trouble describing in a sentence, but it looks lovely (Ian O’Toole art helps) and feels like maybe a spiritual successor to Through the Desert? Designed by Reiner Knizia, published by Bitewing Games.

• Arcs is a medium-weight science fiction strategy game in which you’re doing some great space battling. Designed by Cole Wehrle, published by Leder Games.

• The Gang is sort of a cooperative take on Texas Hold’em, which I’ve just got to play if I’m going to understand how it works at all. Designed by John Cooper and Kory Heath, published by KOSMOS.

• Stamp Swap is a game about stamp collecting with an I Cut, You Choose idea behind it. Designed by Paul Salomon, published by Stonemaier Games.

• Things in Rings is basically Venn Diagrams: The Board Game, which sounds super cool as a lightweight party game. Designed by Peter C. Hayward, published by Allplay.

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Thanks, as always, for reading Don’t Eat the Meeples! I’m excited that we’re nearing the close of the year, and I’m starting to think more deeply about the games I’ve been playing from 2024. While I hope it’s clear from Don’t Eat the Meeples over the years that I think there are so many incredible games in the board game canon, I just love playing new games. Do you feel the same way?

Personally, it’s been an exciting week. My son (15 months! Wow!) is walking around all the time now, and his stumbling eases every day. Seeing change day-to-day is a magical thing we get to experience so rarely in our lives.

Next week: Great roll-and-write games released in 2024