We’re past the halfway point of the year, so we’re way overdue a best games of the year so far rundown:
Best card game – SCOUT
SO GOOD, SO SO GOOD. Can’t recommend this one enough. It’s a ladder climbing game (posh way of describing a game where you are trying to get rid of all your cards). However, you can’t reorganize your hand once you pick it up. You CAN however re-orientate it up or down as it has a number on the top and bottom. If you Scout (an action you can take), you can take cards from the table and slot them anywhere in your hand to improve the order. So there are lots of ways to manipulate your cards. It really is a brilliant design that plays very differently depending on the number of players too.
Best Light/Medium Strategy Game – Foundations of Rome
First off, this game costs a fortune and is only available if you have/will kickstart(ed) the game. It’s enormous, over-produced (depending on your opinion) but is a wonderfully elegant design. 3 simples actions; buy a plot of land, take money or put down a building. There is lots of indirect interaction as you try to take advantage of each others building to score points while the city slowly grows up on the board. It definitely like a game from 15-20 years ago when rules were simpler, but the decision space is still broad and the games play out very differently depending on the choices made by players. We like this enough it will be in the library…
Best Heavy Strategy Game – Ark Nova
I’m going to have to go with the masses on this one (even though I personally think Carnegie is better). Build a conservation park using almost 200 different cards. It combines lots of mechanisms, which although not new, are rarely used in games, so it feels fresh and innovative. The sheer quantity of cards as well as the variety of starting parks with asymmetric abilities makes every session feel different as the game forces you to try different strategies depending on the cards your dealt. Probably best as a 2 or 3 player game (4 players will make a long game), this one is already pushing the top 10 games ever on boardgamegeek, quite the feat for such a new game.
Best Kids Game – Magic Mountain
This is a kids game! Then why do we keep teaching it to groups of adults? Cos it’s such silly fun. It won the Kids game of the year and deservedly so. It’s got a pachinko vibe to it as you drop marbles down course and hope they hit your students rather than the witches. It is primarily a co-op game, although can be played competitively as well. It’s got all the parts that kids love. Moving parts, excitement, unpredictability, a little bit of thinking (without them realising it) and great components at a very reasonable price. We love it.
Other tremendous games:
Living Forest – winner of the advanced game of the year.
Cuphead: Fast Rolling Dice Game – shocking I know, but it’s really good!
My Father’s Work – big, innovative, app supported worker placement game
Blood on the Clocktower – the best werewolf type game ever (why are so many good games this year horribly expensive).
Switch and Signal – a great co-op train game that actually feels like you are controlling trains
Our most popular kids game. Its best described as co-operative Clue. A fox has stolen a pie (typical) and it’s your job to search for clues and find suspects to help narrow down your options as to who it may be before the culprit flees off the board. It has a fun little gizmo for revealing information which kids love. Even some adults enjoy this one.
Hedgehog Roll
1-4 Players
20 Mins
The 2020 Kids game of the year. Similar to many classic kids games, you are trying to move across the board to the finish line. However to move you roll a fuzzy ball (the hedgehog) which picks up leaves and flowers etc… You get to move to the matching space of each piece you collect. Can be played competitively or co-operatively.
Concept Kids
2-6 Players (Play till your done, no scoring)
Charades on a board, for kids. One player will select a card with an animal on it. Then try and get the others to figure out what it is by placing rings over certain traits on the board e.g. It’s orange, eats meat, lives underground…?
6-7 Years
Bear Down
2-4 Players
25 Mins
Each player is a bear trying to collect as much fish as possible. However, the most fish are near the edge of the waterfall and the river is constantly flowing down stream! The game uses the box to create a 3D waterfall to go over, which makes it very fun to watch someone else fall over the edge (just not your own bear).
Pickomino
2-7 Players
30 Mins
A fantastic game that not only helps kids learn arithmetic, but is really fun. Roll lots of dice and collect your worm tiles, but push your luck too far and you will bust. One of the games we donated to schools…
Rhino Hero
2-4 Players
15 Mins
If Jenga and Uno had a baby, this would be it. You want to rid yourself of your hand of cards, but each becomes a floor in a tower, which if it falls, causes you to lose the game.
8-10 Years
Kingdomino
2-4 Players
15 Mins
We’ve written about this one so much, we just love it. Another game we donated to schools. Learn about it here:
The Key: Murder at the Oakdale Club
1-4 Players
30-40 Mins
It’s another deduction game, played in real time. You need to figure out a range of logic puzzles to solve each case. There are 9 different ones in a box. Whomever figures them out using the least amount of clues will win. Another games that adults will really enjoy playing.
Dragonwood
2-4 Players
30 Mins
D&D Rummy? Pretty much! You will draw cards to form sets (runs of cards or x of a kinds), and then spend them to collect special power cards or bash monsters for points through dice rolling.
MicroMacro: Crime City
1-4 Players
10-30 Mins (depending on the case)
Where’s Waldo? in Murder Town?!! The 2021 Game of the Year is a giant city full of people doing naughty things. 16 cases to solve. Some discretion advised; although not graphic in any way, it does involve crimes. If that’s ok, then, kids love, love, love finding things on a map (and secretly so do adults)
10+ Years
Anomia
2-6 Players (you could play with more)
20 Mins
A speed game in which you are looking for symbol matches on cards. If your card pairs up with someone else’s its a race to offer an example of the catagory on their card (e.g. a first name). Seems easy, but Anomia means, when something is on the tip of your toungue but you can’t say it. One of the most played games in the cafe.
Werewords
3-10 Players
10 mins per game
Kids love hidden role games. This game is a mash up of 20 Questions and Werewolf/Mafia. Games are only 10 minutes long, but that means you can play a few so everyone gets a chance to be the Werewolf.
Project L
1-4 Players
30 Mins
This year’s big cafe hit. It’s a game were you try to fill tiles with tetris style pieces. As the game progresses you’ll accumulate more and more tiles allowing you to make bigger, cleverer moves.
7 Wonders Architects
2-7 Players
30 Mins
A streamlined version of the classic game 7 Wonders. The rules have been simplifed, but the strategy is still there in spades. It looks great on the table as well.
Picture Perfect
2-4 Players (5-6 expansion available)
30 Mins
Fresh off the press, this game is another ‘deductive’-ish game. You have 14 people who all have specific demands (I don’t want to stand next to the table, I do want to be next to a plant). You’ll find out these demands piece by piece over a number of rounds and rearrange the guests to try and accomodate as many of them as possible. Then you take a photo (yes, an actual photo on your phone) and score points depending on how happy they are.
This is the second (big) release from Elizabeth Hargrave of Wingspan fame. The flying critters this time are butterflys. It’s about their migration from Eastern USA to Mexico and back (although the butterflys individually only make a one-way trip). It has more of a set collection vibe and is a bit simpler than Wingspan as well.
Release date August 2020
Tekhenu
Probably the big brain burner Euro of the year. By the people who made Tzolk’in and Teuotihuacan, they bring you another game that’s hard to say…
Release date August 2020
Wingspan Oceania Expansion
This is literally all the art there is for the game I can find, so rest assured Emu fans, its probably in the game!
More birds from Down Under. It’ll be similar to the European expansion I’m sure.
Release Date Approx December 2020
Pandemic Legacy Season 0
A prequel set in the 60’s with a cold war vibe. Early reviews put it as the best of the bunch with the feeling being that the designers have built on and learnt from each version.
Release Date late October 2020
A Game of Cat and Mouth
It’s by your peeps from Exploding Kittens; the blurb says its:
“A fiercely competitive magnet-powered, highly-addicting pinball’ish game from the creators of Exploding Kittens. It’s like playing pinball with slingshots – A Cat Paw Slingshot.”
That’s all I can tell you, did you expect anything less? I’m sure it’ll be jolly fun.
Release Date End October 2020
The Castles of Tuscany
Again, not a lot of art to go on here…
A spiritual follow up to the Castles of Burgundy, seen by many gamers as one of the best 2-player games ever (it plays to 4, but most feel its too long at that player count). Other than it is a bit similar to CoB, I know nothing including release date, although tradition would assume an Essen timeline, so I’m going with…
Release Date Early November 2020
Sleeping Gods
Woof, this one looks very interesting, I’ll just plop down the blurb for this one:
“In Sleeping Gods, you and up to 3 friends become Captain Sofi Odessa and her crew, lost in a strange world in 1929 on your steamship, the Manticore. You must work together to survive, exploring exotic islands, meeting new characters, and seeking out the totems of the gods so that you can return home. Sleeping Gods is a campaign game. Each session can last as long as you want. When you are ready to take a break, you mark your progress on a journey log sheet, making it easy to return to the same place in the game the next time you play. You can play solo or with friends throughout your campaign. It’s easy to swap players in and out at will. Your goal is to find at least fourteen totems hidden throughout the world. Like reading a book, you’ll complete this journey one or two hours at a time, discovering new lands, stories, and challenges along the way. Sleeping Gods is an atlas game. Each page of the atlas represents only a small portion of the world you can explore. When you reach the edge of a page and you want to continue in the same direction, you simply turn to a new page and sail onward. Sleeping Gods is a storybook game. Each new location holds wild adventure, hidden treasures, and vivid characters. Your choices affect the characters and the plot of the game, and may help or hinder your chances of getting home!
Release Date October 2020
Viscounts of the West Kingdom
The third instalment in the Red Box line from Shem Phillips (Architects of… and Paladins of…). The previous two were great so pretty high standards are to be expected.
In a month or so, things in BC, Canada will start to loosen up. People will be able to go back to work with restrictions and some businesss will open up. I will write this piece with the assumption that we won’t go back to ‘normal’ for at least a year. We will have some outbreaks, closures, openings until a vaccine is found…ETA 2021.
How will things shake out for the board game industry once we settle back into the new normal next year. By this I mean the publishers, stores and cafe’s that make it up. This will all be pure speculation based on intuition, experience and the knowledge I have of the industry.
The hardest hit will be the small local gaming store (B&M) that focused on Magic the Gathering. Many of these stores are run by passionate gamers who loved the scene and the game and ran their store on pretty thin margins. As it stands, small businesses are receiving little help in regards their largest fixed cost…rent. a $40,000 zero interest loan has been given out in Canada, of which up to $10,000 can be forgiven. This is essentially just passing the cost down the line to a future in which their business is unlikely to be any more profitable than it already is. It’s easy to forget that these owners are also paying rent/mortage on their own homes as well, plus other fixed costs like insurance and utilities. When the restrictions are lifted how will the psychic shock affect M:tG players. It’s a social game, people will only buy product if they have people to play against. How keen are people going to be placed in a small-ish space will 10-20 other people in close proximity? I fully expect a wave of closures over the next year, which will be tragic, especially in smaller communities where it is the only place to meet and play.
The online stores will, I have no doubt, have benefitted from this as people stuck at home scramble for things to do and board games are often mentioned. I read that sales of games are up by almost 250% in the USA, much of that will be traditional board games like Monopoly, but when you search online for ‘best 2 player games’ a large number of hits will point to the modern titles like Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne. Those (non-Amazon) online gaming stores (OLGS) will have received a bulk of those sales and also in visibility. With so many people buying online in the last few weeks, we will see a change in habits once things settle down. Many people will go back to supporting local, but in these situations when forced to change, some will stick and keep buying online. This will be another hit to the local store; and as more B&M stores close, the games people would have bought locally, will now be bought online, increasing the OLGS market share. The final couple of wallops will be the upcoming recession, leaving fewer dollars in people’s pockets to spend. To be fair, board games have been fairly depression resiliant because they are a cheap night in during tough times. However, people nowadays have a lot more games and don’t ‘need’ more and will more likely survive on what they have. Finally, the Canadian dollar is weak right now and demand for our natural resouces low, meaning it’ll not bounce back particlarly soon. Board Games are sold in US dollars which has surged in recent weeks driving up the cost of games in Canada by 10% already. This may force people online looking for cheaper deals than their FLGS can offer which has way higher overheads and a smaller market, unlike the OLGS which operates on huge volumes with smaller margins.
What about the Board Game Cafes? Well unlike smaller B&M stores which have a fairly uniform business model, cafes are a lot more varied. Some have retail, some have liquor, table service, closer to a restuarant/cafe etc…
I feel that one of the biggest factors in their ability to survive will be the amount of debt they were saddled with when the lockdown happened. If they are newer (1-2 years old), this will hit harder. Borrowing more money to add to the debt already being serviced may put a few over the edge. Again, rent will be a killer. If they get no forgiveness and 3 months of minimal income (a few are doing retail, food delieveries), then it could be a hole just too deep to dig themselves out of. If they can get through that, they will be looking at 6-12 months of operating at 50% capacity as limits to occupancy are imposed. You can reduce your staffing to help, but again those fixed costs (rent, insurance, POS charges) all stay the same. If they don’t already do retail, some will add it to diversify and I’m sure other creative measures will be taken to find new revenue streams, but it will leave any business that survives this very weak indeed.
One of the biggest unknowns is how people will react to touching things touched by many other people. There is not a lot cafes can do about this other than provide sanitizing methods for peoples’ hands at the table and request frequent hand washing. We cannot realistically sanitize games because it would destroy them and we can’t with any confidence assure people we have caught every game touched by another person. The psychic scar this event has left on people will I’m sure have left a healthy percentage with an increased aversion to touching common property like door handles, faucets and board games.
There are a few positives though. A evening at a board game cafe is a relatively inexpensive option. In a time of recession, a trip to the movies or dinner at a restaurant may price out a lot of people. 3 hours at a cafe is a very reasonable choice for people on a budget. People will be craving interaction, one thing that a board game cafe offers more than anything else.
A couple of cafes have already closed their doors for good and I’m sure more will follow. How healthy the rest will come out of this is the big question on our minds. It may take a couple of years to get back to where they were before by which time a healthy closure toll may have been taken…
D&D is very popular right now. The major peave I found from players was the difficulty of people getting together consistently to play. Someone always seemed to have clashing plans or bail at the last minute. Now with everyone forced to separate the joys of remote D&D have revealed themselves. It’s always good to get together, but people have realised that using Zoom or some other remote conferencing isn’t actually that bad and if a player leaves a campaign because they moved away, things don’t necessarily need to stop. Rather than cancel a night because a player can’t leave the house, just do it remotely occasionally.
Remote boardgaming has also seen an uptick. I’ve been doing it too and I can say its OK. I used to wonder if one day people would just remote game with each other rather than hit up the cafe, but it’s vastly different. Even while video conferencing at the same time, something is missing. It’s probably not one thing, but lots of small things. The physical touching, the ability to see the board as a whole, being able to explain rules and questions in person is much easier when you can gesture at something, niggling a player in person and so on. In a push it’ll do, but it is a far inferior substitute in my opinion.
On to the big players, the publishers of games. This I’ll have to speculate a lot more on as I’m more removed. Board games sales have increased, so some will have seen an increase in sales, but these will be the big players with the ‘evergreen’ titles. Games that are established and keep selling even years after release (Ticket to Ride, Bohnanza, Pandemic). Many of the smaller publishers rely on a constant stream of new releases every few months to maintain revenue. Theses are the games that come out, sell a few thousand within a couple of months and then dissapear, lost in the myriad of titles that keep coming out. Those sales keep publishers alive while they hunt for their own evergreen game. Now, however, is a terrible time to release a new game. Conventions are a big release period (GenCon, Essen) and can garner a lot of attention to games, but they will not be happening this year. China where a lot of games get made has seen a tonne of disruption, so releases (and cashflow) have been pushed back by manufacturing and shipping delays. Alliance, the biggest distributor in the USA is closed. Many firms have exclusive deals with them to sell their games to stores. That means no-one is getting their games right now. When those games that are backed up do come out, it may be in a waterfall of other games making it even easier for titles to get lost in the slower market of a depression. Overheads for board game publishers are relatively low compared to most businesses, but so are margins. I’m guessing a lot of the smaller firms are going to get swallowed up by the bigger ones if they have quality titles. Those that operate game to game will dissapear. Is this a bad thing? Well for those involved, yes. For the wider scene its not the end of the World. Most people felt that there were waaaaay too many publishers making waaaay too many games. Trying to wade through the deluge of games that never stopped was an almost impossible task for most retailers. So in a year or so I imagine we will see a fairly major consolidation in the industry, with a few big players growing or merging with others to stay alive.
TL;DR, well I see:
a lot smaller brick and morter stores that operated on the margins will close.
the big online game stores will get bigger.
board game cafes that are newer and establishing themselves will struggle mightily over the next 18 months.
many smaller game publishers will be swallowed by the big boys or shut up shop.
