This year I pared back a lot of my playing of new board games, and I think because of how hard it is to always keep on top of the hobby I’m going to make a little change to this end-of-the-year blog post. I’m going to rank 2024 games I played as well as new-to-me 2023 games. I’m also upping the number to 11 for reasons I’ll get into in the list itself.
#11: The White Castle (2023 unplayed)
Devir Games has been putting out some really good thinky games in small boxes. It started with Red Cathedral a couple years ago, Shinkansen: Zero Kei after that, and now this game that also takes place in the past in Japan. The difference here is that it is probably their shortest thinkiest design yet, as players only get nine turns each in the whole game, and building up chains to get the most out of those nine turns is very tough to line up.
On each turn, players will be drafting a die from three bridges to develop their influence in a few different parts of Japanese society, either their courtesans in the Shogun’s palace, the gardeners by the bridges, or the warriors at the training grounds. The nice twist this game provides is one I’ve seen in Pingyao: The First Chinese Banks and has probably been in a few other games as well—You have to pay the difference if your die pips are fewer than the value printed on the “worker” spot where you place it, or you get coins if your die pips are greater than the value printed on the placement spot.
The other two kickers here are first, the speed with which this game goes by. With two players we can get through it in 45 minutes, tops? And that’s with refreshing on the rules and doing the setup. The second is that Devir decided to engage a cultural consultant on this game, which is something I love to see when designers are working in a culture outside their own, just to make sure some basic respect is given to the elements they’re including. The only reason I had this OFF of my 2023 unplayed list is because I didn’t think they had taken this step, and I’m sick of especially games set in Japan or drawing from Japanese cultural influences (like Devir’s other Bitoku and Daitoshi, for example) without any care to what they’re doing with the symbology or language conventions they’re borrowing. It’s especially frustrating how many European companies make money off of these other places and cultures when those countries have their own designers making amazingly good games in the meantime. If you haven’t played any games by Hisaishi Hayashi (Yokohama, Trains, Trick of the Rails, Metro X, Rolling America) or from Oink Games (Deep Sea/Moon Adventure, A Fake Artist Goes to New York, Fafnir), for example, you really should look into them!
Anyway, that’s quite enough of that! …for now.
#10: Rats of Wistar (2023 Unplayed)
I tend to also like games with a good narrative, and while a short meaty game is nice, sometimes a slightly less-meaty longer game is more enjoyable.
Enter Capstone Games’s Rats of Wistar from 2023! Designed by Simone Luciani (Golem, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Barrage) and Danilo Sabia, Rats of Wistar follows the rat leaders of factions of genius mice as they make their case to become the single leader of the mice that live in a farmyard. If you think this sounds familiar to you, it absolutely follows on aspects of the setting and B plot from The Secret of Nimh.
Players allocate their follower mice around the farmyard, and place their leaders in wedges of a central wheel to take actions. The twist here is that the strength of your actions are linked to how many followers are in the farmyard directly outside that section of the wheel. You also have to devote actions to recruiting more mice to your faction, expanding your burrow, and developing lots of inventions to contribute to your society. You also explore the farmhouse, where some random story cards can be revealed that present “missions” for your mice to carry out, and you’re rewarded for how far into the house you delved.
This isn’t the most complex game, but it’s up there with the most satisfying thematic experiences I’ve had playing a strategic game like this. It’s interesting without being exhausting, and there’s something here for every level of board gamer to enjoy. And the sad thing about this is if I wasn’t a fan of many of this designer’s other games AND a fan of many of the games Capstone has released over their existence (Arkwright, Lignum, Imperial Steam, Carthago, Haspelknecht, New York Zoo), this probably wouldn’t have pinged my radar at all. Give it a look!
#9: Scholars of the South Tigris (2023 unplayed)
Okay, now I’m going to be back on my cultural stuff. My biggest caveat about this game is that Garphill Games, who will appear MANY times on this list, have to my knowledge never quoted any cultural consultants on any of their games before despite this current series being set in the region we call the Middle East.
In Wayfarers of the South Tigris, there were towers with specific domes depicted with no concern for what their cultural significance might be. Also, as a writer I can see the branding value of using the same artist across all your products, which Garphill has done for all of their “OCCUPATION of the DIRECTION GEOGRAPHY” games, but I wish they had handed off the reins here with ethnic ancestry in the region. That aside, the bigger issue with Scholars of the South Tigris is this:
This is the most explicitly thematic game they have released, which has opened them up to the possibility that the depictions of different ethnicities displayed in the game are all the more exposed to stereotypical biases. This is the most unfortunately done for the representation of “Hebrew” translators in the game, which leans on such things as the type of nose, hairstyle, and color patterning one can see in caricatures of Jewish people, and furthermore the Hebrew translators are also paired with immediate bonuses that are associated with… any guesses?
If you guessed “gaining money,” you would be right.
Which is a shame. Because if the bare minimum a North American white person like myself can think of as “stereotypes” are the exact things you’d have suggested they avoid in their game, it shows how ignorant the designers at Garphill are. Which is odd, considering that they engaged thoughtfully and explicitly with the concept of ancient slavery in the rulebook of Hadrian’s Wall and also co-released a thoughtful anticolonialist sci-fi game called Circadians: First Light a few years ago.
And hey, no one’s perfect. It would just be nice if they’d tried at all with this game and this trilogy.
Anyway, the issues I’ve cited are the only reasons this game isn’t MUCH higher on this list, and the reason it’s not in my collection.
Why is it here at all?
Well, let me tell you.
This game is about libraries of the South Tigris gathering and translating manuscripts to Arabic to add the knowledge of other cultures to their own. This is done by players claiming manuscripts from around the world in specific languages and making them available in towers, then contracting one to three translators to hop from language to language until the manuscript ends up in Arabic and lands in a player’s scoring pile. While doing this, players are trying to gather the resources they need by moving up six income tracks that are associated with the six primary and secondary colors – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple – and the actions players take require one or two dice of those colors. The bulk of the dice are primary, but if you don’t have a secondary die, you can use a die of each of the colors that make it to take the associated action. Some other actions care about the pip value of the involved dice. And managing the color and value of the dice available to you is a big part of the game.
The gameplay and strategy are incredibly satisfying, and the game cycle of the manuscripts and the careers of the translators you contract is really interesting. To leave it off of my top of the year would be a massive oversight, and depriving Garphill of oxygen or badmouthing them on the whole isn’t fair to the other thoughtful games they’ve released over the years, so I’m giving this 9th place on my list and leaving you to weigh your own gaming considerations for yourself.
It’s also why I expanded this list to 11, so that White Castle, which was as fully considerate a release as I think most game companies will put out, could also get some attention.
#8: Shipwrights of the North Sea: Redux
Oh look! It’s another PROFESSION of the DIRECTION GEOGRAPHY Garphill game!
This one is a very cool fast-paced multi-use card drafting and resource management game. Once cards are drafted, players can simultaneously play them too, which keeps the game moving right along. Any card can be played for its primary purpose, but can also be ditched for immediate resources to help play/build other cards you drafted, which can contribute to points or to building your engine. This one isn’t a heavy lift, or a long lift, but an incredibly satisfying one that I’m waiting to find on the shelf at my Friendly Local Game Store (I played a friend’s crowdfunded copy). There’s not a lot of meat on the bone here, but it does what it does very well with some really interesting decisions to make along the way. After all, sometimes you want to play a game on a weeknight and want to have to think only a little bit after a long day at work.
#7: Oranienburger Kanal (2023 unplayed)
This is your typical Uwe Rosenberg big box worker placement/resource management game, but it takes the tightness of action economy from the 2-player Agricola game and adds in the “estate”-building of games like Ora et Labora or Glass Road/Black Forest where making certain developments in certain places/orders REALLY matters. Some cards you can place on your city board can help you build extra roads/paths/canals, which can help you meet the preconditions for other cards, which can score you huge points. It’s a nice system in a nice package with simple rules and interesting decisions, which is something you might have gleaned by now I think quite highly of. I believe this was released primarily through crowdfunding so it may be a bit hard to find, but I suspect this one may not be a lot of people’s cup of tea so they probably made the right amount of copies. There’s probably a few floating around the secondary market, if you’re tapped into such things.
#6: Gloomhaven: Buttons and Bugs
A narrative dungeon-crawling game with the core mechanisms of Gloom/Frosthaven (my #2 game last year) designed by the designer of my #1 2023 game, Artisans of Splendent Vale? Yes please?
In fact, what Nikki Valens (also Legacy of Dragonholt, Arkham/Eldritch Horror) did developing Buttons and Bugs was not just adapt, but iterate and improve upon everything a BLANKhaven game can be. Instead of having a hand of cards that you can play and then pick up, Buttons and Bugs still has a player (it’s a solo game) playing two cards from a hand of, say, 3 or 4 cards to move their character around a card-sized dungeon map and attacking monsters. Unlike other BLANKhaven games, these cards are double-sided, and after you play cards the first time, you flip one of them over to its B side, which has a generally more powerful ability. Then, once you play it on its B side, it goes to your discard pile. So instead of churning through cards or requiring the printing of dozens for every character class, it really streamlines the production process and, as a bonus, creates a really interesting decision space. On top of that, it can pack a story (sure, not as epic) in the same size box as a card game. It’s a marvel of design.
#5: Nucleum (2023 unplayed)
Simone Luciani returns! This time with David Turczi, the solo designer for Mindclash Games (Trickerion, last year’s #9 Septima, 2024’s Voidfall) in a power grid building game with some really interesting action selection.
When you expand your network, you have to permanently remove action tiles from your collection. The more tiles you play to your player board before taking a Reset turn, the more income from your income tracks you’re entitled to, and the more Stars you can accumulate before you have to turn them all in the better for qualifying for certain endgame scoring thresholds.
In a space as full as power grid/route building in board games, a new entry needs to bring something special to stand out or not feel like a retread, and Nucleum does it. That’s really it. Believe the hype!
#4: Ezra and Nehemiah
GARPHILL’S BACK, ALRIGHT!
They’ve been on fire the last few years. Raiders of Scythia was a great niche historical re-setting of Raiders of the North Sea, featuring a culture that doesn’t get a lot of focus with some gender roles that were not the typical ones found in the Greco-Roman world. Hadrian’s Wall was a flip-n-write about a monument in Britain built by an emperor with a male lover who he later deified.
In Ezra and Nehemiah, they take the Biblical account of occupied Israel being allowed by King Nebucchadnezzar to return to Jerusalem to rebuild their city and culture.
Hm.
I also grew up Southern Baptist, and the story of Nehemiah was one of my favorites. It’s just a story about a guy getting a wall built, but was seen as being worth putting in the Bible.
As far as the game goes, Ezra and Nehemiah borrows a lot of elements from other Garphill titles, especially my favorite elements of Paladins of the West Kingdom and Viscounts of the West Kingdom, as well as a couple mechanisms from the earlier-mentioned Scholars of the South Tigris. Thus, this game is why I really don’t miss any of the other three in my collection. It is its own game, to be sure, but when the other games felt like they were missing something they needed to be great and this one ties them all together in such a nice interweaving of mechanisms, a hierarchy, for me, presented itself. It also uses the Biblical accounts pretty objectively as a framework for a really solid resource management game with a variable tech tree and clever action card-playing strategy.
#3: Evacuation (2023 Unplayed)
Vladimir Suchy really came through with this one, delivering on the high expectations I had for it from last year.
In Evacuation, the sun is expanding soon and it’s imperative that players evacuate the industries and population from their quadrant of the planet to a nearby habitable planet before it’s too late. There are four rounds to do it in, and each round players can take as many actions as they can pay power for. Those actions can be used to spend resources and either evacuate or repopulate, or buy ships for transporting the people you evacuated to the new world. The timing of winding down and winding up operations is key to your success, and is a puzzle muddled by the bonuses you can get by maybe being a little less efficient to meet the narrow window you need to hit to earn them.
As far as the theme goes, this could have been a game about how we are ruining this planet, and while I love a game that is aware of what we are doing to the Earth, I think it’s important to the theme here that we aren’t responsible for ruining the planet we’re leaving, so we don’t have to feel guilty about taking that ethos to the planet we’re going to. Suns expand. It’s a thing that actually happens out there, and will happen to us one day completely beyond our agency.
#2: Pagan: Fate of Roanoke
This was originally a crowdfunded game a few years ago, but was picked up for polish and wider release by Capstone Games. Pagan is a 2-player asymmetrical card game, where one player takes the role of a Witch in the town of Roanoke trying to perform a ritual, and the other player plays a Witch-hunter trying to interrogate villagers to discover who the Witch’s helper is.
This is also a game where players each have a unique cardset and entirely different resources than their opponent, and crafting the deck (with content packs) is half the fun. Unlike another asymmetrical Limited Card Game, Android: Netrunner, Pagan manages to make its core game box compelling enough on its own by providing a streamlined battleground in its villager cards that feels reminiscent of the intergalactic conflict of Star Wars: Rebellion (Rebellion turning galactic favor against the empire before the Empire can find and extinguish the Rebel base) but bottled in a two-hour card game.
Oh, and to top it all off, because of the potential sensitivities around depictions of Indigenous North American people in the game, Capstone also hired a couple cultural consultants for this project. Ever since listening to community feedback for its colorblind-friendly release of The Estates back in the late 2010s, I’m thrilled to see Capstone continue to take steps to be not just a publisher of excellent games, but a more considerate publisher in the hobby as well.
#1: Inventions: Evolution of Ideas
Vital Lacerda is BACK. That is, assuming you felt like me that On Mars and Weather Machine were missing a certain je nais se quoi that his earlier designs like The Gallerist, Lisboa, and Vinhos had.
In Inventions, players take the role of societies engaging in an exchange of ideas while developing their economies, industries, wealth, and culture back home.
The Ideas/Inventions part of the game reminded me a lot of Scholars of the South Tigris, yet another reason Scholars’ absence from my collection isn’t much felt. Players have 2 Ideas cards at a time by their player board, and it takes an action to Present it in one of 7 regions of the world. From there, any player can Invent that Idea and flip the card, any player may optionally Innovate on that idea, and one already-involved player may Share that invention with the world. Once Sharing occurs, all contributing players get rewards based on which process(es) they performed: Presenting earns points, Inventing earns the card into a player’s tableau widening bonus options and tile-laying discounts, Innovating builds presence on the world map, and Sharing earns the society a Wealth tile for endgame scoring.
The other aspects of society—Culture, Economy, Technology—are also tiles, which players arrange in a hexagon grid on their player board. This is a costly process, as you must exhaust more specialists of the matching type for the number of already-placed tiles it touches. And these are specialists that you also use to contribute to matching invention types on the main board that also move back and forth between your society board, to the map, and as Diplomats to “Milestones” (broader concepts that act as prerequisites to Invent ideas). Specialists are the primary, and efficiently the only, resource in the game.
Back to the tiles, their thematic flavor get lost quite quickly to their function and how you obtain them. Culture tiles are White and provide permanent abilities. You acquire them by traveling the world map. Economy tiles are Green and provide abilities you can use once per round. You acquire them by pulling specialists back to your society from the map. Technology tiles are Brown and provide one-time-only bonus actions, then you flip the tile over. You acquire them by Inventing Ideas. And all the abilities/bonuses are incredibly mechanism-based and don’t readily feel inspired by the type of tile they are categorized into. Why would being able to move more on the map be cultural and not economical or industrial? Any advantage could be construed as possible via a developed economy. And why are economy tiles not the one-time bonuses? Wouldn’t developed technology be more capable of repeatable or permanent results?
Ultimately, this quibble is me being nitpicky about an element of the game that feels much more integrated to an overall strategic game system than some. The similarly-named Inventors of the South Tigris also from this year features a similar Ideas life cycle, but has an entire mechanism in exploration that is completely worthless if no one else participates in it. Conversely, the buzzy 2024 board game Unconscious Mind has a publishing/citation system that I was able to use to my benefit that no one else chose to tap into. In Inventions, nothing feels extra or ignorable. Also, in so many games like this when you get a “bonus action” it’s somehow a pared-down, less memorable version of the main actions you can take. In Inventions, however, this is not the case—you get to take a bonus FULL action, and the actions are written out on a player aid and also written in visual shorthand on the main game board so you can refer back to it and make sure you don’t miss anything you’re entitled to. It’s another keen efficiency in design that I really appreciate. Another little thing that leaps off the board to me is that some care was taken to make all actions useful at all stages of the game for different reasons. No action is useless. No action is wasted. The game doesn’t need to ramp up. And it doesn’t overstay its welcome, as most players’ society grids will be mostly full by the end of the game.
The design cherry on top of this is the action selection mechanism this game uses. The 10 main actions in the game are paired and placed into 5 Forums. Each player gets to take 3 main actions each era (and possibly link them into more a limited number of times based on how much Influence they have), but it’s key to note that players cannot take another main action from a Forum they already occupy. To keep this interesting, the players’ Epoch pillars are a little bit bigger than their other two Season pillars used to take actions. At the end of an Era, the Season pillars are removed, while the Epoch pillar remains to close off a Forum for the next turn. And yes, if you’re worried about getting in your own way, there IS a special bonus tile (a one-off Technology ability) that allows you once per game to place your pillar where you already have one.
I’ve played this several times and have enjoyed the puzzles and the collaboration it brings to the table. It’s a big game that I’ve found both worth the price point and the square footage to play and cubic footage to store.
The top 5 unplayed
There were some games that came out in 2024 that I wanted to play but haven’t gotten a chance to yet:
Cities
Phil Walker-Harding (Sushi Go, Barenpark, Gizmos) and Steve Finn (Biblios, Herbaceous, Sunset Over Water) are a couple amazing designers of lighter games, and having them working together on a tile-laying game can’t go any way but fun and engaging.
Quacks of Quedlinburg: the Duel
My partner and I really enjoy the push-your-luck bag building of the original, but we’ve also found that “Duel” versions of larger games like Imhotep, Splendor, and Kingdomino often bring extra mechanisms or considerations to the original that make them more interesting, more strategic experiences.
Leviathan Wilds
This is a cooperative game about giant beasts that are acting more aggressively than their nature due to some kind of infection or corruption, and the players have to climb around them and cleansing them of this influence. There are a few different styles of abilities the different decks of ability cards have, both for moving around and for acting to help the beasts, and the difficulty can be scaled for the type of experience you want to have with the game.
Endeavor: Deep Sea
This one is an ecological game about exploring, researching, and protecting the ocean, while considering what kind of logistical challenges might come along with it. We’re a sucker for good natural science or environmental games, so this one is probably just going to be a matter of time.
Minos: Dawn of the Bronze Age
This one had me when youtube channel ThinkerThemer described it as “Coimbra, but more.” This is a dice drafting game (they’re rolled first) with dice of multiple colors where both the value and the color of the die has implications later in the round. There is almost nothing I love more than having to choose a die where every possible number it could be showing is desirable for one reason or another. And the nice thing about dice drafts is that all players are equally affected by the way they rolled, and that means that if there is such a thing as a “bad roll,” it can create a play experience that feels very different than one that has all “good rolls,” making the game as a whole more versatile.
And that’s all for this year! Thanks for reading, and hold on tight, everyone. Take care of yourselves and your communities. See you again next year for another one.