According to the publisher (and therefore take it with a grain of salt, seeing their history with the production) it’s already in the boats being shipped to the depots, so probably will be on sale in a month or two.
My top 5 from the last 5 years would be:
- Roll for the Galaxy
- Imperial Settlers
- Above and Below
- Machi Koro
- Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective
I’ll try to get time to write some commentary on my picks.
5 ± 30 years.
Yeah this has gone through numerous editions going back to 1981.
Haha. Yep! But a new, overhauled release counts, if you as me. And if you tell me it doesn’t then I guess I’ll pick Mythos Tales.
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Andean Abyss - Standing in for the entire COIN series that followed and could easily fill the entire five spaces. This series was just so fantastically innovative and each of the volumes have been unique and fresh.
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War of the Ring - The way this game captures the whole scope of the Trilogy is just amazing. You’ve got great asymmetry as the free peoples struggle to mobilize and fight a desperate war at a severe disadvantage. But, they have the fellowship trying for its end run to Mount Doom. That chase is a great way to get Sauron to sink resources into the search rather than carry on his offensives. This second version is also just a beautiful game to look at.
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Churchill - How does Mark Herman make World War Two new and exciting? When he has the players step in to the roles of the Big Three as they struggle against each other. Victory is on the horizon but who will be triumphant in the modern era?
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Star Wars Rebellion - My other favorite game about counterinsurgency. This game was just such a home run of nailing the asymmetrical conflict and generating great narratives.
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Virgin Queen - Mostly an excuse to talk about Here I Stand, which would be number one if this was the all time list. Virgin Queen does offer lots of neat little differences and is a great game in it’s own right.
Tom Mc
Sounds like someone didn’t read the original post. :)
-Tom
Okay, here are my top five. If I could lump all the Oniverse games together (Onirim, Sylvion, Castellion, and Nautilion), I would probably make room for them on the list. But I can’t pick just one.
(WHY DOES DISCOURSE INSIST ON INVERTING MY LIST???)
dummytext to prevent Discourse from screwing up my list
5. Dawn of the Zeds
4. Voyages of Marco Polo
3. Quartermaster General
2. A Study in Emerald
- Archipelago
-Tom
If you subtract 2004 from 2017, you get 13. Then if you add the 1 and 3 together, you get 4. Which is clearly less than 5. So there.
The borderline terrible Archipelago? Wow!
I assume you mean the never again available in-print first edition of A Study in Emerald? :(
I saw this coming. The version I got into was the 2012 second edition:
I never owned or played the Fantasy Flight version.
Tom Mc
Before Tom goes after us for 7 wonders… there were several expansions released in the past few years, great ones even!
Oh, so we can just vote for reprints of games? Good thing I’m not making the rules here, mister. Because War of the Ring is no more a 2012 game than Star Wars is a 1997 movie called Episode IV: A New Hope!
So we’re picking expansions as well? It’s utter chaos in here!
Ha ha, you’re one of those people.
I love how Archipelago confounds people who have no idea what to make of it’s unique inter-player dynamics, which basically comes down to never letting anyone think you’re winning and, furthermore, trying to make everyone else think they’re winning! This is partly why it’s my favorite boardgame. The psychological aspect of the game, the bluffing, the gameplay and interaction between the rules. It’s like no other game, and it’s certainly not like any mere traitor game. I honestly can’t think of any other game to compare it to. It’s like an arthouse movie in a medium that consists entirely of summer blockbusters.
There is only one edition of A Study in Emerald.
-Tom, adjusting his monocle
I don’t know if they made any changes to War of the Ring 2E, but things like Descent 2E and Mansions of Madness 2E certainly show that Fantasy Flight is willing to make major changes to a game and claim it’s just a new edition. (And of course, they’re not alone, c.f. A Study in Emerald.)
That’s great and all, but rather group dependent rather than a comment on the game itself. In my plays of the game, everyone was convinced I was winning and nothing I could say or do could stop them ganging up on me, well right up until I predictably won the game.
I really want to like this game, it’s individual mechanisms are really interesting, and it looks so beautiful. It’s like going on a holiday! But you’ll have to do more to convince me that they come together to form a coherent experience than this.
Ooh, I love that you said this, because I couldn’t disagree more! The psychological interplay in Archipelago is a fundamental part of the game design. What’s group dependent is whether or not enough people understand that interplay. :)
There’s an element of “playing it wrong” if you don’t stress the part of the rules about who wins. You win by holding back native independence. That’s the victory condition. That’s it. Period. Archipelago is truly co-op. But then there’s the concept of a Grand Winner, which is whoever has the most victory points. Does a player who’s not going to be the Grand Winner then decide that everyone will lose? Maybe. It’s a perfectly viable approach to the game. That’s where the psychology comes into play. If I’m a player who’s going to drag the game down if I can’t be Grand Winner (spoiler: I am), then you have to make sure I think I might be winning. The game design in Archipelago uniquely allows for this with the hidden victory points, the hidden game clock, and the hidden resources.
But if you can’t sell to a group winning vs grand winning as a part of the design and as a meaningful concept – and I admit it can be a tough sell because it’s a unique concept in boardgaming that might sound purely semantic – I don’t think you can play Archipelago as it was designed. It would be like trying to play Agricola with someone who’s decided that only pigs score victory points. Yeah, sure, that person can get through a game of Agricola, but he’s not going to understand how he should be playing, or how other people or playing, or even what the point of the game is. That’s the “doing it wrong” part that I’m talking about, and why I think Archipelago is confounding to a lot of people.
Anyway, where do you live again? How soon can you make it over to my house? I’ll set us up an Archipelago game done right!
-Tom
Wait, I thought co-op games were solitaire games!
I just can’t personally see Archipelago as a co-op game, and if I can’t then I can hardly be expected to persuade other people of that. Either I care about being the winner or I don’t. And if I care about winning, then I’d rather everyone lose than we all ‘not lose’ and someone else actually win.
Ok, so after much consideration, here are my picks. I tried to choose 100% original designs released in 2012 or later - no reprints, reissues, or re-skins. No second editions of existing games. No nuthin’.
5. The Dark Valley (GMT - Ted Raicer, 2013). I’m a total WWII East Front nut. Probably being from Poland or something. And I have almost everything you can imagine about it, from monsters like Drang Nach Osten and Fire in the East to more playable stuff like The Russian Campaign and No Retreat. But Ted Raicer, who designed the seminal Paths of Glory about how yes World War I can be fun to play, somehow turned variable-activation-by-chit-pull into the best simulation that I’ve seen of this conflict that doesn’t have to leave a lot of things to abstraction. This is an honest-to-goodness panzer-pushing, hex-and-factor-counting wargame that for some reason doesn’t quite seem like an regular wargame. Plus, the way the Counterattack chit works, it almost perfectly simulates the ability to create a Smolensk-like meatgrinder that severely blunts the panzer force. Best overall simulation of the campaign I’ve seen. Not for beginners, though.
4. Enemy Action: Ardennes (Compass Games - John H. Butterfield, 2015). Whoa! Bulge. I promised myself never to buy another Bulge or Normandy game, because c’mon Bulge and Normandy? But I did, and wow. John Butterfield has somehow perfected the solo wargame design. RAF, D-Day: Omaha Beach, he even designed Ambush! Now he produces a solo game that plays as a two-player game with no loss of agency. Excellent as either, and that’s a huge achievement.
3. U.S. Civil War (GMT - Mark Simonitch, 2015). I’m not a big ACW fan, so surprise, surprise at this one. I love the way the rules and map work together. I like the way the map does so much to recreate the logic of the historical campaigns through geography. I love the way it’s not just about Washington or Richmond, but really is. I really like it, Sam I Am.
2. Churchill (GMT - Mark Herman, 2015). This is nothing less than a complete re-imagining of World War II done in a way that no one had thought of in one million years yet seems so perfect that you wonder why they didn’t think of it when games started. Three players (!) fight over issues that will influence the course of the war. Then they apply the issues and see what happens. This is strategic World War II in a way you’ve never seen it. And it’s for three people. Best three-player game ever. Move over, Ra.
1. Dien Bien Phu: The Final Gamble (Legion Wargames - Kim Kanger, 2014). This was on my list on the first Wild Weasel as the “best wargame of all time.” I totally stand behind that statement. It does something rare in historical simulation: it perfectly captures the historical moment, and does it with simple (but not simplistic) mechanics that evoke the period with every single part of the rules. I defy you to find a better “airdrop into a siege” mechanic than this one. Why didn’t people think of this earlier, instead of the standard, “this plane is carrying this thing and you shoot at it and you miss ok now roll for the drop” mechanic? Because it takes genius to expose mediocrity. I have played three games designed by Kim Kanger, and all of them are incredible at taking historical essence and putting it in cardboard. Too bad Tonkin and Ici c’est la France came out before 2012.
NB: I tried, but could not, fit a COIN game on here. These games are all just better. And I was disappointed that Strike of the Eagle and Sekigahara came out in 2011.
Yeah!!