The Problem with Colors

Colored ComponentsYou’re sitting down to play your favorite game, you pop open the box, and you start pulling out the pieces. It’s then that the pre-game activities begin, starting right off with the squabble for who gets which components.

Because game pieces innately come in colors.

We’ve been trained through years of playing that color is how we recognize which pieces belong to whom. When a game like Tigris & Euphrates comes along, which marks player pieces with symbols instead of colors, it’s a problem. I don’t know how many players I’ve seen who didn’t understand that they couldn’t be blue, red, black, or green in T&E. Personally, I found that I had to make my brain leap through strange hoops the first time I played that much esteemed game because symbols didn’t make sense, and colors do.
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2005’s Top 70 Games

The IGA has been on my mind lately, thanks to Coldfoot’s posting and to a number of parallel threads on spielfrieks. So I’ve been wanting to offer my thoughts on the best games of the last year, but not as a typical IGA nomination response, because that inevitably involves a lot of, “Well, I’ve heard good things about this one, but since they inexplicably choose a small-press German game which about 100 people have copies of in the US, I naturally haven’t gotten to play it and thus can’t say”.

Instead I offer the following: a list of the 70 “new” games that I’ve newly played in the last 12 months, ranked in order from my favorite to my least, with comments on each and links to any reviews that I’ve written (or in a few cases, session reports instead).

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