Good Board Games

Valeria Card Kingdoms is a game I was fortunate enough to demo this year at Origins Game Convention in Columbus Ohio. It is a tableau building game (Similar to Machi Koro if you're familiar with that) in which you roll dice to gain resources from various citizen cards you aquire on your turns, that you will exchange for various other cards on your turn. To put it more simply, you get cards that give you stuff when certain numbers on a die are rolled. You then use that stuff to buy more cards to give you, you guessed it, even more stuff. Inflation tends to be a thing in this game as towards the end of the game everyone has alot of stuff, but the game does not disappoint in what you can do as a player to spend your stuff. You can slay monsters with might and magic that will earn you victory points (and stuff), you can buy citizens to get you more stuff from the dice being rolled, or you can buy domain cards for special powers and even more victory points (and stuff). Each play

We all know the tale of the Hare and Tortoise , well now we have another chance to play out their historic race. Rio Grande games has purchased the rights to a classic Ravensburger game "Hase und Igel" (Hare and porcupine as the German fable goes). The original game by Ravensburger won the first ever Spiel Des Jahres award for excellence in game design back in 1979, and with seemingly few tweaks to the original, Hare and Tortoise looks as good as the original, if not better. The game plays 2-6 racers with an interesting mechanic of needing to calculate how fast you should run to burn your fuel, (carrots) while still having some left to make it across the line. The game being a race, it helps to go fast like a hare; however, being the fabled race it is sometimes better to pace yourself like a tortoise. The racing mechanic is fairly straightforward and players will learn how they can move easily. The tricky part comes in when they need to manage moving forward to win the ra

One of the most interesting games I've ever played is The Mind . It's not a game where the rules are complicated or even one where the rules are hard to understand, but it is a game that when you have success it's an overwhelming feeling of accomplishment by the entire group. Players that I've personally sat down and played a game or two will literally be standing on furniture screaming for joy fists clenched in the air like they've just won the Superbowl. What's the premise of the game then? Well you play cards numbered from 1-100 in ascending chronological order. Seems like sorting rather than a game so far, I know. Here's the catch. You and your partners can't talk. In fact the only form of communication is direct and indirect eye contact. Not even small hums and buts are permitted. You and your teammates work as a group to achieve the task of effectively in shuffling the giant deck. To achieve this the game is played in rounds. In round one each

One of the newer board games that became the topic of many conversations as gaming conventions last year was Photosynthesis . The game involves its namesake process in which you gain points from the sun based on how many trees you have that are growing in open, non-shaded areas. The game play is based around resource management and board control, but has enough quirks and foibles to make the game unique and exciting. Players take turns planting seeds, growing trees, throwing new seeds towards the center of the board, and eventually harvesting mature trees to accommodate space for new sprouts. To score points players harvest only the largest, most mature trees from the board. By doing this that player is sacrificing gaining new points from the sun in exchange for a leg up on the scoreboard. If you do this too soon you might not have the resources to repopulate; however, too late and you might be left behind. In addition to being a good strategy game that has beautiful pieces. This