GNG´s Very Belated Games of 2022! 😳
November 2, 2023 by Sam
We’ve still been adding more and more data to the website and, with Joe and I still exploring the landscape and lucky enough to know like-minded people, we were treated to a number of new games last year. Now, as 2023 hurtles to a close, it’s quite hard to reach back through time and recall what was new when, but with a bit of detective work we have narrowed our choices for new-to-us games of 2022 to these ten. There’s only three more months until this year’s list is due!
Heat takes the designer’s previous race game Flamme Rouge and imbues it with even more drama. Flamme Rouge’s inherent tension largely rests on the timing of big moments, whereas Heat produces these moments more consistently, on a round by round basis. We’re not die-hard race-game fans here at GNG or it might be higher, and our minor reservations about game-length and a sort of procedural feeling stopped us falling for it in a colossal way. But we wouldn’t deny it’s a great design, from a great design team.
This one took Sam by stealth whilst Joe was enamoured of it straight away. A deck of cards, beautifully presented, and a rummy-esque game of collecting sets… but some sets are pairs, and some pairs when played trigger bonuses, like an extra turn or stealing a card from an opponent. What really pushes Sea Salt & Paper into the favourites though is the natty scoring system, where you can win conservatively or take a risk and go for big points.
8. Set & Match
We like to include a dexterity game if we can, and happily Set & Match is one of the best. It follows the rules of tennis except instead of a ball on a court you have a felt-backed disc on a board, and don’t need tennis whites or good weather to play. If the idea of tapping a disc back and forth sounds dull, never fear: Set & Match has you covered with a brilliant rally system that lets players pressure each other for points by hitting shots to the edges of the court. It’s a gem.
7. Mille Fiori
Designer Reiner Knizia isn’t usually known for ‘point salad’ games, where everything scores and it’s about choosing best. But with Mille Fiori he’s definitely dabbling. Being Knizia, however, any danger of non-interaction and silent heads-down noodling is ducked by dastardly opportunities on the board and a canny action-selection system where you can pull off fantastic chaining moves, vomiting points like a guilty slot machine. Or you can watch as someone else does it before you, and score nothing!
A dumb party game that gives dumb party games a good name. So many of these boxes that pop up in high street shops with punny names look band average and, in my experience, turn out to be so. Herd Mentality takes a simple idea and doesn’t try to dress it up with a shedload of props or a veneer of innuendo, letting players themselves supply the joy in a simple idea: what will most people answer to this question? Get that right, and you’re on the right path to victory – although with games like this, victory is always secondary to the discussions the answers often prompt.
In this age of bigger boxes, massive minis, and lists of stuff on the backs of games as though more = better, it’s delightfully reassuring to stumble across a game like Tiger & Dragon, where the objective is simply to shed your (beautiful) tiles before anyone else does. How is another matter, because that entails not only how much points you’ll get – it always depends on the last tile – but also whether you’ve given the game away to your opponents. A wonderful, shrewdly designed pleasure.
4 Strike!
It’s kind of impossible to sell Strike! by describing it: it needs to be played. Chuck dice in an arena, be the last one standing. It’s got just enough about it not to feel like a total lottery, and yet manages to feel stupidly chaotic anyway. And dumb, and fun, and exceedingly one-note. But that note is a Looney Toons anvil and each game lasts 5 minutes – so why not one more go?
Based on a video game (we haven’t played) Northgard does a couple things that we don’t get hugely overexcited by – oversized box, plastic minis… but the game is simple at its heart, with just four actions, and yet so dramatically designed to pull players toward each other into canny, puzzley, sneaky combat, that – along with the possibility of an early victory – every game we’ve had has felt like a medium-sized classic. It’s not one that we love visually and it feels like it could have been in a much smaller box, with less plastic. But as a game it’s great. Besides, at least it’s not…
2 Nemesis
Which has all those sins with bells on. Enormo-minis give it an enormo-price-point and besides that, there’s a veritable cornucopia of bits and chits and dingleberries nestled inside its bottomless box. But wow, as an event game Nemesis is fantastic: an unnaturally immersive tale of the players caught aboard a spaceship with Very Unfriendly extraterrestrials out to get them. As well as trying to creep around unheard to make sure the ship is functional whilst not getting eaten, each player has their own – possibly reprehensible – secret aims to fulfil in order to win. Oh, and to win you must also not be dead, which can be tricky to pull off… it’s a big beast of a game, but one that feels like it really succeeds at what it’s trying to do.
Whereas So Clover isn’t beastly at all – in fact, you’re working together to try and figure out clues given by your fellow players, who must remain poker-faced throughout. GNG just love games that explore the differences in perception, lateral thinking, clue-giving, common ground and especially when – like Codenames and Decrypto before it – they furnish you with A-ha! moments that feel rewarding because they’re not just about success; they’re about genuine connection with each other. And along with long-term favourites Decrypto and Wavelength, So Clover does this so well. It’s not a photogenic game, but over a century of plays in we are still going back for more and throughly appreciating it: so simple, and yet so good.
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.