New to Me: Fall 2013

Though my new gaming was light in fall (primarily because my gaming was light in fall, due to the holidays), I’ve opted to publish my short list of new-to-me games while they’re all still fresh. (And it looks like I still managed almost a dozen new games.) As always this is an assessment of how much I like the games, rather than whether they’re great or not. I tend to prefer light-to-medium euros that don’t make me work too hard.


The Great

Caverna: The Cave FarmersCaverna: The Cave Farmers (2013). I thought Agricola (2007) was great the first time I played it, because it combined worker placement with scarcity and it also supported deep and thoughtful gameplay. It’s too long for me to play very often, but it’s still a great game that I love when I play. Caverna is essentially more of the same, but with fantasy theming, with some simplified game elements, with reduced randomness, and with an interesting new expeditions systems. Overall, it’s a great variant, that’s just (barely) far enough from the original that you might want to own both.

Continue reading

New to Me: Fall 2012

I’ve continued to be largely incommunicado in recent weeks, and that’s been due to illness. Before the 2nd I hadn’t even played any games in a couple of weeks, which will tell you how sick I’ve been. As a result, my newest “new to me” column is about a month later than usual.

This one talks about the games that I played in October, November, and December that I’d never played before.

The Great

Timeline (2011). I was surprised to discover that I’d only started playing this in fall because it’s already become a regular part of my game nights. The concept is simple: each player is dealt a handful of discoveries, events, or inventions. One at a time you have to place these in a timeline in their correct order. So it’s a trivia game, which I usually hate, but somehow this one really works. Maybe because the guessing seems simple enough. You just have to figure out where a card goes relative to the others. The result is surprisingly thoughtful and fun and … dare I say it … educational. Its really quick gameplay helps a lot too.

Continue reading

Shannon’s Christmas ’12 Gift-Giving Guide

Christmas is just around the corner. If you haven’t already picked up presents for your family and friends … it’s getting down to the wire. To help the process along, I wanted to offer what I hope will be the first in an annual series of board-game gift-giving guides.

I’ve mostly focused on games from the last year or two, with a few references to older releases. Everything’s organized by the type of gamer you’re giving to, with the caveat that most of my suggestions are euro games — which means somewhat more strategic and somewhat more abstract.

If there are any other great games from recent years that belong on this list, please tell me about them in the comments below, along with the type of gamer that you’d give them to. Continue reading