GNG´s games of 2021
December 10, 2021 by Sam
After a quiet 2020 mostly spent in the house thanks to Covid, in 2021 we were ‘back in the room’, face to face and playing both old favourites and new-to-us titles. Every year we like to make a somewhat arbitrary list of games you might have enjoyed too, or missed, or loathed, because lists are stupid but also fun and it’s nice to cap off the past 12 months with a little reflection.
Here in no particular order, then, are ten games we really liked, for a variety of reasons. Will they be your best games too? Probably not: there are literally thousands of new titles every year and thousands of divergent tastes to either appeal to, or maybe conjure a face of disgust. We’ve used no real criteria here other than the aforementioned newness and ‘ten games that spring to mind’. We’re scientific like that.
The Games!
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We might have played this more than any other, as it’s so simple, fast, silly and funny. It takes the lateral-thinking of Codenames but condenses it down into a comparatively frivolous ten minutes of brain-scratching, as you try to link together two random words such as sandwich and photocopier with a third word to clue your team-mates on which part of the grid you’re aiming to fill. We’ve found it occasionally frustrating, often hilarious and always compelling.
Runner-up in the bonkers-clueing category is the even-cleverer (but marginally less punchy) So Clover.
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An old favourite of ours is Midnight Party, a dice-chucking luckfest where party guests are pursued around a country house by the hungry ghost Hugo. Sheepy Time offers a similar experience, but with a little more nuance. I wasn’t sure that adding currencies and extra powers would really work, as the joy of Midnight Party is at least partly down to how silly it is. But Sheepy Time was fast-moving fun, with simple decisions (play one of two cards) and the same inherent luck-pushing that makes Midnight Party so fun. A hit!
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This is a really simple numbers game of pushing your luck, but draped over it is a cloak of storytelling, where the stories are preposterously silly and confected from exaggerations, boast and outright lies. Being caught in a fib is bad, as you lose out. But keeping your exaggerations too small-minded is unlikely to win you the game – albeit the fun in the Hellfire Club is more about the journey than the destination: chaotically stupid, deliberately silly, it deserves a much larger audience than it currently has.
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When Lizzie Magie came up with Monopoly it wasn’t so much envisaged as the staple of family get-togethers (and arguments) for the next hundred years, but a warning against the inherent evil of land monopolies. Magnate is an updating of both the medium and the message, as players co-operatively build a city, before co-operatively selling it off to cause a market crash and competitively comparing the size of their wallets. It’s fiddly in places, but very clever, very enjoyable, and loaded with both risk and evil.
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Like Magnate, SHASN is a game with something to say, and if it doesn’t do it quite as elegantly it’s still feisty good fun for the right bunch of players, as everyone jostles for position in an election, and exercises all manner of interfering in each other’s business. It’s not perfect: it can run quite long, and the marriage of social commentary and gameplay can feel mechanical at times, but it’s trying to be different in a market saturated with lots of similarly-minded titles, and one can’t deny each play is something of an event, with every turn players answering an ideological question in a virtual interview, and beholden to their potential voters…
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Whereas Quirky Circuits takes the exceedingly simple mechanic of an older game (The Mind) and grafts it successfully onto something new, as the players play cards face down to – hopefully – navigate various robots through various cluttered scenarios: an automated vacuum around a house, a bee through a garden. It’s brilliantly simple, but- increasingly, as you go through the book of scenarios – fiendishly hard to pull off before your batteries run out!
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We love word games so Hardback was going to have to struggle to be a miss, but this is a significant improvement on a game we already liked in Paperback. Collecting letters with which to spell words is, admittedly, not everyone’s cup of tea. But if you’re sympathetic to the idea, Hardback mixes in both suits – which can trigger benefits and bonuses – and the currency of ink which you can use to embolden your hand and score bigger, longer words! If you hate word games us repeatedly saying ‘words’ is probably not changing your mind. But if you find Scrabble tedious and exhausting, this could be the fix you didn’t know you were looking for…
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Designer Uwe Rosenberg loves farm games like a farmer loves a sheepdog. Agricola, Caverna, Fields of Arle to name but three, each using the same core ideas – send your family out to do jobs for you, reap the rewards – but iterating just enough to feel distinct from its predecessors. Unusually for Rosenberg, Hallertau carries elements of luck and risk, as the new element here is cards, with everyone looking at how to best synergise their cards with the available actions on the board. Does it put any of its sister games in the shade? Probably not, but it’s proof that Rosenberg can still milk a gentle cow without feeling like he’s flogging a bored dead horse: relatively simple (compared to some that came before) and rather more-ish for those who like to dabble.
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The LOOP is a bonkers time-travelling co-op of saving the world from Dr Foo. It’s silly, crazy, chaotic, and can end quite abruptly when things go wrong. Like most games on the list, it’s not exactly elegant. Maybe we’re over elegance and after 2020, just needed more of the stupid.
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But in every list of games there must be at least one big, cognitively heavy, tough to learn and harder to beat title that is fun in the same way a particularly tricky cryptic crossword is fun. Spirit Island suprised me: once you’re over the hurdle of learning it, it actually plays reasonably quickly (although it’s not a short game!) and the various overlapping challenges you face of just not losing whilst you stagger, duck, and only occasionally stroll toward a win are engaging and cleverly constructed. And whilst it’s hardly a reflective thesis on the subject, it’s nice to see the oft-visited theme of colonialism turned on its head, with the arriving forces from far-flung climes finally representing the bad guys instead of the heroes.
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.