GNG´s games of 2019!
December 27, 2019 by Sam
Hooray! More opinionated content for everyone. The below list are titles new to us in 2019: some were actually published before this year, but all have hit the the table and found their way into our hearts in some small – or large – way. Caveat alert: we played a lot of games this year and have used any and every excuse to squeeze in more titles than a top ten can mathematically withstand. Sorry. Caveat two: although Joe has played most of the below, this is largely speaking a Sam list. Joe’s preferences however will feature heavily in the upcoming Best Two Player Games…
Sam's top ten
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Choosing a top ten is tricky, and ordering them is even trickier, but Orbit: The International Space Race (currently without a publisher) navigates its way to the podium for me because of a number of things. Mechanically it’s not unique, and thematically there have been numerous games about the space race before. But inside an unassuming box is a lovingly presented game. Inside a simple set of rules is a proper challenge, and in every play a dramatic story. There is asymmetry in the various space agencies you can play, different strategic paths, tactical decisions, and even luck-pushing, should you want it, in flexible amounts for the risk-averse to the cosmonautic gamblers amongst us. It steers a deft path between puzzle and competition that really scratches an itch for me. But mainly it’s here because it looks and feels like a classic game: one that has always been around, will always be around, and deserves a much larger audience than it currently has.
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There’s a bunch of Pax games that I’ve not played – I think Joe is a little more familiar with them – but having loved Cole Wehrle’s Root, I was intrigued to try this second edition of Pax Pamir. Revisiting the carve up of Afghanistan, players are not the British or Russian empires out to exploit the resources for their own gain, but local tribespeople seeking to steer the conflict in a direction that benefits the people who actually live there. It’s not an easy one to grasp – there’s a lot going on both on and off the board – but when you peer in close everything happening has a thematic sense. Temporary alliances are forged and broken, armies built and destroyed, spies move among the conflict’s characters to extort or assassinate – there’s an intriguing depth to every single play and, as with Root, although there’s a fairly high cognitive price to get in, it’s worth the admission.
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Sol was published in 2017, but we only discovered it this year, and I have enjoyed many adventures in doomed space since it first arrived. A dying star is emitting its last blasts of energy, and the players harvest the energy as best they can in order to escape the galaxy. Sol’s mechanics are pretty abstracted – very abstracted in places – it’s a space opera with no combat (unless you want it), a weird hybrid of resource-gathering, tactical planning and luck-pushing, and yet somehow it tells a story every time. Both a curio, and a triumph. A generous nod here to Tiny Towns as well, which has a similar patterns-build-things element to it, but in a slightly less apocalyptic package.
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But if space races or the political shenanigans of the 19th century all sound a bit heavy going, then QE is like the bouncing child at the other end of a seesaw from a sombre-faced adult. Thematically, it might sound dry as bones: QE stands for quantitive easing: a printing of money to alleviate short term financial issues that inevitably leads to longer-term problems. Basically, it’s a bidding game where you bid whatever you like – anything from 1 dollar (or nothing, in fact) to billions and billions. You’re printing your own money, after all, so what’s the problem? Well, the problem is whoever has spent the most at the end of the game finishes last, no matter what delicious industries they’ve bought up. Whoops!
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And if QE is still not silly enough, how about FlickFleet? We’re back in space again, but there’s not a great deal of rocket science here: just undistilled fun. A two-player battle of astral domination between the the goodies and the baddies, with the spaceships powered – as you might have gathered – by gigantic astral fingers (yours) that flick them across the playing surface, before flicking dice-that-do-damage at each other, causing ruptures and eventual cataclysm… all in 20 minutes flat. There’s a last-one-standing simplicity to it, or you can play one of the scenarios that bring a little more depth…
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I like having an epic game in my top ten, and although Underwater Cities was in the running and Ancient Civilisations of the Inner Sea was a caveat-vaulting bunch of fun, I guess 2019 is the year of space games for me because SpaceCorp bumps them. It’s beyond epic: a game of three games, on three boards: the inner planets, the outer planets, the stars beyond, as players move across the firmament and strive to become the best space crews in the business. Despite the colossal undertaking – four of us took five hours to play it – turns are simple and fast, using an easy-to-learn card system, and there’s a relative simplicity to the opening board that is slowly built upon (until you reach the stars, at least. Then it goes a bit crazy). And if it all sounds a bit too much of a commitment, you can just play one or two boards instead, and keep the whole game for when you’ve not got too much in the diary.
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When is a game not a game? Well, if the destination means more than the journey, then you might say when it’s Stinker: scoring is pretty arbitrary and winning almost even more so. But Stinker is so much fun; a game of quickly writing the opening line to your novel, the worst thing to say on a blind date, or explaining what’s under the Pope’s hat (courgettes, according to Joe). If you’re as childish as we are it can get quite silly, but it can also be played with some decorum, and it’s one of those any-ages games that made us love Just One so much in 2018 (and still do, in fact) Like Sol, we only discovered Stinker this year, but have come to love it.
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Another recent discovery, also from 2017. This is a nasty, evil, screw-you game of bad-beat stories and undeserving triumphs. The artwork looks a bit odd, the players scoring tokens are too big for the score-track, and it can all end incredibly suddenly just as you’re about to pull off the best senatorial bit of devious shysterism ever. It’s also great fun. See also: the more beautifully presented and similarly swingy Tulip Bubble, which could easily sit here instead, and only narrowly misses the cut.
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I love a stacking game, me, and although Bandu (with simplified rules) remains my favourite, Menara pushed it close this year. A co-operative challenge that demands players reconstruct a temple to a certain height in order to… well, to be honest I forget why. With stacking games the story isn’t important to me. What’s important is that Menara amplifies the challenge in a way that belies the presentation: neither the box nor the bits scream Game of the Year! and yet it really does deserve its place on the list. A head-turning presence on the table too. Runner-up in this category is the also-worth-your-attention Men at Work; perhaps not as great a challenge as Menara, but preferable for those who prefer competition to co-operation.
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I guess this really was the year of space games for me. A one or two player challenge in a tiny box, Assembly is one of my most-played games of 2019 thanks to the addictive simplicity of its shifting-sands puzzle: your goal is to escape from a fracturing spaceship, but the ship’s computer is trying to stop you. It’s an unassuming looking thing, but one that really did get its hooks into me, and can be scaled to give you more difficulty depending on how optimistic/doomed you feel.
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Just a few mentions for a clutch of games it was hard to leave out: There’s very few new games I’d complain about – and those I do are sometimes very highly-thought of. Design these days is generally of such a high standard that most new titles have something to recommend them. Nonetheless there are a few I’d like to mention here as very much worthy of attention; we’ve had fun with the word-clueing of Letter Jam, tension with the ousting (or not) of Richard Nixon in Watergate (for two-player excellence see also: Undaunted, Air Land and Sea, and Iron Curtain), wizardly elemental elan-management with Res Arcana, track-laying nastiness across the Northern Pacific, and compelling stories of triumph and tragedy in of Brave Little Belgium. Card games went to a new frontier with co-operative space-faring trick-taking missions – here if only for that description – in Die Crew, and I can’t let 2019 come to a close without a round of applause for Hurlyburly: the best type of nonsense there is.
Sam likes games. He buys a lot of games, plays a lot of games, and likes talking about games too. Occasionally he dreams about games. Despite this, he is a happily married individual with reasonably well-adjusted children, who roll their eyes at him on a pretty frequent basis.
But they still play the odd game, so it's ok.
Sam's favourite games are a constantly shifting thing that he'd find hard to define, although he's not mad keen on orcs, miniatures, or heavy sets of rules with endless exceptions and special circumstances. He plays the occasional solo game, but feels a big part of board-gaming's appeal is the gathering of friends around a table, interacting with a tangible, physical thing.