GNG´s Top 10 games of 2018

January 3, 2019 by Joe

Or to be precise, our top 20! We’ve taken the liberty of choosing ten each, albeit there’s some crossover. We played a lot of new games in 2018 and many excellent ones didn’t quite make the list(s) – but what is a list for, if not to inspire outrage and regret? Sam

I find ordering my favourite games of the year quite a challenge, because the context in which a particular game is played has a lot to say about how enjoyable it is. So these are ten of my favourite titles of the last 12 months, in no particular order. And just like Sam, there are a fair few that didn’t quite make the cut. Perhaps we need to do a ‘under-appreciated gems’ post at some point. Joe

Joe's top 10 of 2018

1. Circle the Wagons

   One of two games on this list that comprise of just 18 cards! A fiendishly more-ish, endlessly iterative classic of a game that lasts barely 10 minutes. You can carry it around in a wallet, and it offers so much. Great for fans of tile-laying games like Carcassonne, and modular scoring criteria games like Kingdom Builder.

2. Decrypto

   I didn’t know whether I really needed another game like Codenames in my life, but it turns out I did. Decrypto adds the brilliance of trying to decrypt your opponents clues too – that along with the need for increasingly lateral clues of your own makes it immensely satisfying to play. It feels leisurely and almost relaxing to play, too.

3. The Mind

   Ah, the Mind. The game that has hardcore gamers up in arms across the globe, incensed at its very existence. The problem, they say, is that you can simply count along in your head. Try not doing that, however, and the game becomes intensely fun, and incredibly satisfying when you’re all in sync and able to pull off audacious successes. Sheer minimalist brilliance.

4. Iron Curtain

   This is the other game of the year for me that consists of just 18 cards (and a handful of cubes). There are a few games that have tried to distill a real world conflict down to a bare-bones microgame, but this is the only one that feels like a proper game in itself, and a real battle of wits.

5. Word Slam

   Brilliant, immediately accessible word-guessing fun. The last few years I’ve discovered that whilst my family don’t enjoy big heavy games, they will play the odd party game. And team games like this (along with Codenames, and Decrypto to name but two) have the added benefit of playing a large, and fluctuating, number of players.

6. Zero Down

   2018 has seen a raft of new games from veteran designer Reiner Knizia, and there are a couple on my list. Zero Down isn’t a new one, but was reissued this year I think, and certainly I hadn’t played it before. We’ve played a lot fo simple card games over the last year, and the immediacy of this really appeals to me – hoping to get the perfect hand before the other players – and the double knock! Do you do the first knock before you’re ready to end the round, as a pre-emptive strike? So simple, and so lovely!

7. AuZtralia

   I’m a big Martin Wallace fan, but it’s been a while since any of his recent games have grabbed me. And this might not be one I want to play a huge number of times – but my plays of it have involved a lovely abundance of story, and made us all laugh, even as our farms are razed to the ground by building-sized unspeakably horrors. Chaotic fun!

8. Powerships

   I don’t know how much I like race games – most seem to bog down a bit for me – but Powerships is one we’ve had a lot of fun with this year. The 3-sided dice (just try and work out how that’s possible) acceleration/deceleration is ingenious, and feels brilliantly thematic as you hare around the solar system crashing into things like astroid belts and each other.

9. Root

   Root caused more of a stir this year than any other game, I think – for a while I thought it might be the last game Sam ever needed, so enamoured was he with its asymmetric charms. And it’s an incredibly clever piece of engineering – four players each playing a completely by different set of rules to a common end. In the end though, I ended up admiring it more than I enjoyed it, which is not to say I didn’t enjoy it. I did, but I failed to get beyond the faction I was playing enough to feel like I knew what anyone else’s motives were, and act accordingly. If I play a game more than a handful of times, I’m waiting for that moment where the rules fall away and we, the gamers, begin really just playing each other. With Root that moment was just buried too far for me to get to. But it’s a very special game, and I must say without doubt the prettiest game I played this year – I absolutely love the art style.

10. Blue Lagoon

    Ok I only played this once before the end of the year – but I’m going to put it here anyway. It’s one of Reiner Knizia’s new designs, and it’s a fiendishly feisty, nasty little thing. Ample opportunities for stuffing one another over as you race to gather resources, dominate islands and form unbroken chains across multiple isles, all in pretty, tropical paradise hues. On this evidence, the ubiquitous designer has lost none of his brilliant powers – and I’m looking forward to playing much more of this in 2019.

Sam's Top 10 of 2018

1. Decrypto

   I have just had so much fun with Decrypto – one of those games where things going wrong can be as much fun as when you get it right – and when you get it right, it’s very satisfying! A clever word game where you need your clues to make enough sense for your teammates, but confusing enough to bamboozle the opposition – just a huge amount of fun and one we’ve played many, many times over this last year.

2. The Mind

   My memories of The Mind are wrapped up in a huge amount of laughter. It’s a great leveller, for kids and adults, gamers and ‘non-gamers’ (whatever that means!) and one where – like Decrypto – getting the game ‘right’ is just so satisfying, but getting it wrong is even more hilarious.

3. Root

   If games 1 and 2 are all about the absurd, almost anarchic experience of play, then Root is a more ‘serious’ proposition: a big learning curve and a highly combative, possibly brutal experience dressed up in cuddly characters from a lost children’s book circa 1971. Each player is a faction in a forest fighting for control, but although everyone’s objective is the same (at least, at the start!) how each faction plays is markedly different. It’s a game of scheming and tactics and luck-pushing, it looks gorgeous and is in many ways a triumph of board game design. You need to be patient to find the heart of this particular forest, but although it’s a trek at times, it’s more than worth it.

4. Just One

   After Root, though, you might want to forget fighting and work together to guess a word. Sometimes the funnest games (see The Mind) come from the simplest ideas, and Just One has been seen on our table many times, and always proved popular.

5. AuZtralia

   Somewhere in my top ten I need a game that’s a story. Root does tick this box, but does it have Cthulu zombies waking from the dead and savaging your farm as it staggers through an alternative universe Australian outback in the 1930’s? No, it does not. So here, instead, is the bizarre, dramatic, and faintly silly Auztralia.

6. Texas Showdown

   I love trick-taking games and I think this is the best new one I played in 2018. Like most trick-taking games, you must follow suit if you can. Unlike most trick-taking games, any ‘dumped’ suits are now available to follow as well, and you don’t want to win tricks! It’s possible to go from a strong position (no tricks!) to a terrible one (lots of tricks!) as the spiral of death hits you and everything falls apart. Like a couple of the games below, this is actually came out before 2018, but it was new to me so I’m cheating a bit and including it.

7. Nemo´s War

   I’m generally not a player of solo games but the very pretty Nemo’s War (which can also be played as a co-op) was a real surprise to me. Dressed up like a war-game, it looks a rather serious undertaking – but beneath the skin is a fun and pretty immersive dice-chucker, where you push your luck by leveraging elements of the Nautilus (captain, crew, hull) against the challenges you face at sea, and – it seems – thrive early on, before the harsh seas take their toll and things begin to fall apart…

8. Wordsy

   Like Nemo’s War, this actually came out in 2017 but I didn’t play it until last year, when Joe introduced it to me. I’m a big fan of word games such as Movable Type and What’s My Word, so I was always going to enjoy Wordsy. Make words, the longer the better, as fast as you can. I’m pretty bad at it, but it’s a lot of high-pressure fun in ten minutes.

9. Heaven and Ale

   Another that’s snuck in by virtue of being new to me in 2018, Heaven and Ale is a heavenly puzzle game that doesn’t really bear any relation to the theme (14th century monks brewing beer) it purports to represent. But it doesn’t matter because as a puzzle, they don’t come much better.

10. Tag City

    I had to have a roll and write game on my top ten and Tag City takes the delicious agony of options-running-out prevalent in those games and marries it with the tetromino-puzzling of Barenpark, where you’re trying to fit all these mad shapes into one area. But it’s also a race – or to be exact, several races at once, where each decision is crucial.