I’ve been tracking each time I’ve played a board game this year. It’s been interesting to see so far. Nothing particularly relevant to post about it, but it’s spurred me to invite a few folks over, so hey, that’s all good. And now that it’s summertime for the kids, we’ve played a few more games.

Cubitos is a great little racing game where you buy a bunch of dice, and use them to both buy dice, move, and trigger special powers. A lot like Quacks of Quedlinburg, but with a racing component. You basically try to buy a bunch of dice that generate “combos”, and then hope that you roll well enough to trigger some interesting stuff each turn. At some point, you go from engine-building to buy more stuff to “I’ve gotta get stuff to help me move as fast as possible!”. It’s great. It’s accessible, it’s super fun, there’s some strategy to it, but still a lot of luck. As a family game? Fantastic.

Heat: Pedal to the Metal is one of my new favs. It’s also a push-your-luck racing game, but with a fixed hand of cards. The main decisions in Heat come down to trying to manage your hand to go around corners as fast as possible without overheating your car. You pick a gear to be in, which determines how many cards you can play, and how many cards you want to play is determined by what’s in your hand. And the deck is small enough that you’ll have a pretty solid idea of what’s left in it, but there’s still enough wiggle room for things to go very, very wrong.

Heat is one of the most elegant games I’ve seen in a long while. It’s intense, there’s tons of strategy, and yet the rules are simple, there aren’t many of them, and it all makes thematic sense. It became a huge hit last year, and it’s easy to see why.

A few other games I’ve played recently:

• Furnace is about as pure an “engine-builder” as you can get. Buy cards to build your factories, and then convert resources into points as efficiently as possible. There’s an interesting bidding mechanic re: how you buy cards, and sometimes instead of buying a card, you’ll want to place second, so that you can use that card’s special ability. It’s an odd game when sometimes the worst thing that can happen is that you can win. Incredibly fast, also very elegant, very enjoyable. I picked this up totally on a lark from someone on Craigslist, and an was very pleasantly surprised.
• Dorf Romantik – was the other game in that Craigslist purchase. I liked the videogame, it was a nice, zen little tile laying thing. The board game, on the other hand is great. It’s a single-player experience (despite what the box says) with a campaign that evolves the game over time. But it’s still a zen, tile-laying experience. There’s something to the tactility of it, and the low stakes involved. This has become my favorite single-player board game by quite a lot.
• Dune: Imperium – I managed to get a few friends rounded up multiple times to play Dune, and every time it’s been exciting, close, and tense. We all picked up the app, so weirdly, aside from Gloomhaven, this is the game where we can get together and all not just know how to play, but be quite good at it. And yet, different people & different strategies win every time. It really is dependent on how well you can react to the state of the board and what everyone else is doing. There are times when you just can’t get an engine fired up due to some bad draws or other bad circumstance, but I don’t ever feel like the game is screwing me, it often just feels like I made the wrong decision in the moment. Throw on Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack, and this is thematically on point.

One of the fun things is that sometimes the kids join the adults for games. One of our friends’ sons played Dune with us, and then he, Jin and Kuno all joined for Heat (which supports a lot of players). These games are maybe a little too much for Kuno, still (he really enjoys Cubitos, and wiped the floor with us all in the photo above), but it’s clear that there are a broader selection of available options that’ll be good fits now than there were a year ago, and that space will just get more and more interesting.

Stuff I’ve picked up & am excited to try:

• Thunder Road: Vendetta – hesitated on this because it seems in practice really similar to the Fast & Furious game by Prospero Hall. But bit anyway, because Mad Max why not.
• Sol: Last Days of a Star – I’ve wanted this for ages, but it was out of print for years. Jumped on the crowdfunding campaign for the reprint, but haven’t played it yet.
• Earthborne Rangers – I picked this up in part because it was produced with a focus on sustainability, and the general post-apocalyptic-but-still-optimistic vibe was really interesting. Reviews are over the moon about it, so I’d love to give it a shot. But campaign games are hard to coordinate these days. 🙁
• Daybreak – same thing re: sustainability, plus a game about combating climate change from the designer of Pandemic? Yeah, this was a no-brainer for me.
• Apiary – Stonemaier games almost always get my vote (I passed on Wyrmspan, though – I couldn’t justify it given that we have Wingspan and like it, but don’t play it often enough to justify two similar games). Why? I like Jamie Stegmeyer’s interaction with the audience, his transparency, and what seem to me to be really positive business practices. And always-stunning production values. I mean, Expedition’s mechs were bananas.
• Let’s Go to Japan! – I got this before we went to Japan, and wanted to get it to evoke memories of that trip. Funny, because it’s a game about planning and optimizing a trip to Japan – something I actually hate doing in practice. I think when it comes to travel, I tend to be more of a “make-it-up-as-we-go” person, but that can often be less ideal than having some measure of a plan before we get there. Fortunately, Ei-Nyung’s a planner and (at least claims to be someone who) enjoys it. So maybe she’ll like this game. 😀