As the name would suggest, Marco Polo is a game about trading and travel. To win the game you need to fulfill contracts, which is a recipe selection problem making you assemble the right combination of pepper, silk, and gold. You also need to move around the board, setting up trading houses on a path from Venezia to Beijing. To enable this, you have dice acting as workers for worker placement actions. Higher numbers are usually better, but not always, so you have to plan when and where to use different pip values.

On the whole this is a game where it's not too difficult to figure out what is the best thing to do, but much harder to figure out how to acheive it. To move requires juggling scarce money and camels. You need to choose contracts which don't distract you too much from movement, and vice-versa.

There's a lot of variability in the setup. Each city on the map is dealt a card with its worker placement actions, which can significantly alter the strategic options. Furthermore each player gets a character who has a wildy over-powered special ability (since they are all over-powered, none of them are over-powered). The player interaction is fairly limited, suiting a mood when there isn't too much blocking and jabbing between players while you figure out how marshal your meager resources.

A few years after this, the same designers released a sibling game: Marco Polo II: In the Service of the Khan. It uses similar mechanisms, and has the same variability in setup and characters. But the game feels very different: resources are plentiful, so the puzzle how best to use them in order to get the best score.

The “18xx” family of games is one of the longest-running niches in hobby board games, dating back to the 1980's and the game 1830. Fans of 18xx games celebrate their low luck and high interactivity. Players are investors buying stock in rail companies, building track, running train companies, and participating in stock market manipulations. 18xx games are known for being long and full of traps for new players. 18 Chesapeake is designed to be a shorter game, playable in a few hours, and friendly to the inexperienced. It's a good starting point for one of the most fascinating niches in board games.

7 wonders is another development of the tableau-building card game, following on from San Juan and Race for the Galaxy. It's main change is the way the cards are made available to the players. The deck comes in three sections (ages). All the cards for an age are distributed between the players. Each turn they may build one card into their tableau and pass the remaining cards to the next player for the next turn. Each age brings increasingly powerful and expensive cards. This mechanic means 7 Wonders has less randomness than other tableau-builders.

I'm impressed by how well this game scales to more people. Player turns, which are all about deciding which card to build, are simultaneous, so even with 6-7 players the game can go quickly. The mechanics encourage you to interact a good deal with the players either side of you, but much less so to everyone else.

7 Wonders sits in a good sweet spot between San Juan and Race for the Galaxy. If the former is too simple and latter too complex, then this is an ideal game. However unlike most tableau-building games it isn't so good for travel, as there are other components beside the cards.

Age of Steam and Steam are two closely related railway games, sufficiently similar that I consider them to be effectively the same game. They are set on a map of some part of the world marked with cities, rivers, and hills. Each city contains a bunch of randomly placed colored cubes which need to be delivered to a city of the matching color. Players lay track to connect cities, which then allow them to deliver the cubes to increase their income and score victory points. As they do this they can also turn small towns on the map into cities adding more sources and destinations for cubes. Building track costs money, so each turn the players have to decide how much money they will need to raise with loans: too much is expensive, but not as expensive as too little.

This game involves lots of interplay between players. My plans can easily be thrown out by another player building track where I'm intending to go, or moving a cube I was planning to use. Turn order is important, and determined by an often tense auction. There is a real feel of building up a railway business here, reinforced by the fact that it takes several turns before you actually make a profit at the end of the round (always a satisfying moment).

That there are two games is the result of an intellectual property dispute between the designer (Martin Wallace) and developer (Winsome). Age of Steam was the original game, Wallace came out with Steam: Rails to Riches, as effectively a second edition, but had to do so under a different name. Steam comes with two variant rules - I play with the standard rules, which are the closest to Age of Steam. There is also a third member of the family: Railways of the World. There are ferocious arguments among aficionados as to which is the best version of this game, but I don't see the differences between Age of Steam and standard Steam to be significant.

One of the main reasons I don't find the differences between the two to be a big deal is due to the way the game expands. Expansions come as new maps, each of which plays over a new territory, but also adds tweaks to the game play that are equivalent to the difference in base rules. The older Age of Steam has more maps available (over 100), but Steam has 20 or so, which is probably enough for most people. It's important to play a map that fits the number of players. (While there are reasonable maps for 2 players, the game is best experienced with at least three.)

I like (Age of) Steam for its fairly simple rules that result in rich gameplay, the blend of route building and money management, the tense auction, the variability that the random cube placements provide to each play, the constant interaction between the players, and the almost endless varieties of maps to explore.

It's hard to get a more banal and peaceful theme than Agricola's theme of building up a farmstead. Each turn you get a few actions, allowing you to improve your farmstead by adding ovens, ploughing fields, gathering wood, and the like. Steadily these actions allow you to accumulate, in particular allowing to undertake “family growth” (ahem sex) which is vital as it gives you more actions at the cost of more family members to feed.

The thinking in the game is stringing together a good sequence of actions that allows you to build as impressive a farm as you can. while ensuring you can feed your family with each step of the way. Often you need particular resources to make certain improvements, which involves planning ahead several turns. But this planning is complicated by Agricola's astute use of the worker placement mechanism, where players compete for the actions they want to do. Often I find myself making a hard choice, taking a less important action earlier because I'm sure someone else wants to take it first, then tensely waiting to see if the other one gets bagged before it comes to me.

On starting a game, you get a hand of cards that give you special abilities that you have the option to build. This had comes from a large deck: providing a lot of potential variation between plays. I've found these cards to only have a secondary impact on my plays, but those who play regularly find it drives strategy and greatly adds to the game's replayability.

I enjoy that playing Agricola is hard work and absorbing, but plenty of people would find the constant planning and tension to be a bit too much. If you enjoy the game but find it too much mental effort, you should take a look at Viticulture which has a similar theme and basic worker placement mechanic, but with more random elements and a lighter feel.

Alhambra combines card management and tile placement mechanics with a theme of building up a palace (named after the wonderful Alhambra in Granada). Each turn a player may draw currency cards which she then uses to buy palace tiles. You score victory points based on the configuration of your palace. Conflict with others is based around getting hold of the money cards and tiles, both of which sit in open decks.

There's a lot of randomness, with both the cards and tiles drawn randomly, but also plenty of decisions: whether spend cards or keep them for later, which tiles to buy and how to place them when you've bought them. Alhambra remains a popular choice for us and our friends.

In the 80's I played a lot of role-playing games, and certainly at that time Call of Cthulhu was always popular. I only dipped into it a few times (never playing a regular campaign) but there was always something appealing about its atmosphere and its emphasis on investigation rather than combat.

Arkham Horror gets as close to the feel of a RPG that I can imagine in a board game. You start with a character sheet and collaborate to explore the board, collecting helpful allies and items, while trying to find and seal gateways from another world before you are overrun by monsters and demons.

This is a long game, and can easily drag well beyond the states 4 hours, particularly since the rules are rather complex, getting in the way of the story and steadily lowering your SAN. A similar, but later game is Eldritch Horror, and I think that's a much better game.

Each turn a player chooses a travel card from a deck and decides whether to use a card to travel to the next city. The winner is the player who gets around the world using the least days, although I like that this doesn't correspond to turns in the game.

At the start of each round we fill several coasters (called “factories”) with four patterned tiles, each one of five patterns. Each turn a player picks a pile of these tiles, takes all of one pattern and puts the rest into the middle. All the tiles they take, must fit on one row of one to five slots on their board. When all the piles are empty, players remove any rows that are full, moving a tile onto their final display, scoring depending on the layout of tiles on that display.

Early on it's easy to do this, but as more tiles appear on the display, I can't put the same pattern on the corresponding row, so it gets harder to pick tiles that will score for me, and if I pick tiles that don't fit, I get penalty points.

The resulting game mixes optimizing my own geometry and figuring out how block opponents, or dump a load of unplayable tiles on them. The rules are simple to teach, and the components are gorgeous to handle. This game is a throw-back to the golden early years of German board games, and deservedly won the 2018 Spiel des Jahres.

Big Boss is a game about share ownership and mergers. The game is played on a loop of 72 spaces. Players have cards allowing them to found companies on this track and control the growth of companies along it. They may buy shares in these companies. Should two companies connect on the track, the larger one takes over the smaller one, giving owners of shares in that larger company a gain.

The numbered loop is abstract, but that concentrates attention on judging and manipulating the growth on the track. The game is about trying to figure out which companies will grow and become dominant, getting shares in those companies, and manipulating the game's levers to ensure they do become dominant.

Brass is an economic game set during the Industrial Revolition. Each round, players place industries on a map of part of Britain, connect them with canal or rail links, take loans, and sell goods. Victory points come from those industries that have found a market, and from links to those successful industries.

A striking feature of this game is the interplay of competition and cooperation. I want to build a new iron works, but to do that I need coal, which I get from your coal mine over canal links owned by someone else. By taking your coal, I allow you to flip that mine, allowing it to generate income and score victory points for you. But later you may use my iron and flip that for my benefit. This kind of symbiotic interaction is rare and difficult in board games, but is one I particularly enjoy.

There are two variants of Brass. Brass Lancashire is the original game, released in 2008, Brass Birmingham came later in 2018. From discussions I've seen, new players are probably better starting with Birmingham. Both games are now produced by Roxley in a production that is truly gorgeous, with maps detailed with actual landmarks in the period, (a special treat for someone who grew up in the middle of the Birmingham map).

This is a more complex game, and like such games I suggest playing it twice in quick succession. You'll probably struggle on your first play, but the second will go more smoothly. There is a lot of depth to this game, combined with a strong sense of its theme. It deserves its reputation as one of the best heavy economic games you can get.

I teach the rules for Brass Birmingham on the Heavy Cardboard playthrough. I took part in an in-depth review of Brass Birmingham on the Heavy Cardboard podcast. I wrote a longer article on Brass Birmingham celebrating its rise to the #1 spot on Board Game Geek.

Carcassonne centers around placing tiles. Each round you get a random tile, which you have to place with the other tiles according to simple matching rules (each side must match the sides of the tiles you put it next too). As you place tiles you may also place workers (referred to as “meeples”) which then allow you to score points. For instance if you place a meeple on a river, it will score one point each time you extend the river.

The game begins with a single tile, but soon spreads out over the table, each time the draw of the tiles leads to a different shape with different challenges. Much of the art of the game is deciding how to use your limited store of meeples, you only have a few, so you need to place them where they can get the most points. The simple rules and randomness of the tile draw make this a good gateway game.

Carcassonne comes in different versions. The original version has many extensions. We have the Hunters and Gatherers version of the game, and many people consider it a better worked out 2.0 version. But if you prefer games with extensions, then you may prefer the original.

Carcassonne can pack into a compact travel size in your luggage, which means we've often taken it with us on vacations (including the inevitable game in Carcassonne). It does require us to find a clear table to play on.

This is a rare eurogame with dice, but like Settlers of Catan, the dice influence what you can choose to do, rather than the outcome of your choice. Each player builds up an estate of tiles on a simple hex grid. Each turn you can either take tiles to put into a holding area, or place those tiles onto your estate. The dice and color matching constrain where you can place the tiles, so your decisions are constrained by what places you have available and competition with other players for who gets which tiles first.

We've found this to be an absorbing game, striking an appealing balance between the ease of play of Settlers and the strategic elements of Puerto Rico. Indeed I heard it described as a blend of Settlers and Agricola, which I think sums it up pretty well.

The theme of Caylus is that of a developer in a medieval town. You have a fixed number of workers, each turn you can pay them to either work on the King's castle, or to build commercial buildings in town. There are a limited amount of actions available, once a player places a worker to take an action, that action isn't available to anyone else. As the game continues you gain victory points by royal favors, the buildings you build in town, and various other actions your workers perform.

Caylus is one of those high-thinking, low-randomness games. Its core mechanic, now called worker-placement, has since been widely copied. Each turn I have to decide which actions I want to do, but may find my plans spoiled by other players taking the actions I want. I thus try to predict their moves, and have to work around the blockages that inevitably come.

One of the earliest and most successful such copies is Agricola, another game I'm glad to have in my collection. Caylus lacks the random setup that comes through Agricola's opening card draw, but develops more dynamically as players build new available places for the workers. I find Caylus more open-ended: lots of ways to score points, with different combinations coming up with each game.

Caylus has a rich iconography to explain what the various actions do, All the rules are expressed on the board and tiles in this form, which is useful and satisfying once you learn it, but some players find difficult to learn and work with. In this way it's similar to Race for the Galaxy and players that dislike the iconography and the open-endedness of either of these games will probably dislike the other.

Citadels was the first tableau-building game I came across. Like other tableau building game, each turn a player may draw cards and build cards in her tableau. In addition players take a role for their turn which gives them different bonuses or action choices.

I wouldn't recommend this game as a first tableau-builder as the others all have an advantage: San Juan is better for a simplicity game, Race for the Galaxy is better for a more complex game, and 7 Wonders is better for larger numbers of players. But despite this lack of comparative recommendability, it's still a fun game to play.

The title refers to a poem about Chicago as it grew into a great city in the late nineteenth century, and this game is about the companies that fueled its rise. Each player is an investment house who may start such companies, and use its partners to set them up with workers, resources, and managers. Each decade the companies operate, competing with each other to sell in different markets, making money, and providing dividends to its shareholders.

A key mechanic in this game is stock-holding, players may hold shares in each others companies, rewarding good investment decisions when they see a company is likely to have a good round. There's also plenty of scope for financial manipulation, such as selling your own stock to dump a company on a minor shareholder while you start a new company with better prospects on the proceeds of the sale. (This mechanism is the same kind as used in 18XX games.)

To run the companies there is a worker placement mechanism for partners to do various things to improve the company: hire employees, get resources, automate factories, and the like. The players operate the companies by running their factories, consuming resources, and selling finished goods to the different markets, which have varying demands for the goods.

The decisions here come from the interplay of operating successful companies with investment and stock manipulation. The resulting battle for actions and stocks leads to plenty of interaction between the players.In the end, it doesn't matter how profitable and well run the companies are - the only victory points are the money in the investors' personal accounts.

(The game has an expansion that adds some extra companies. I would advise against using this expansion unless everyone at the table is familiar with the game. Otherwise some of these new companies can run away with the game.)

(I take part in an in-depth review in the Heavy Cardboard podcast)

The board for Concordia is a map of part of the Roman world. Players move their colonists over this world and build (trading) houses. These houses can produce goods, which the players use to gain money and build more houses. Actions in the game are governed by each player having an initially identical hand of cards. Each turn a player plays a card from their hand and carries out the action described on the cards. One of these cards allows them to pick up their played cards back into their hand, making them available again. Players may also buy more cards, giving them more choice for actions and more time before needing to retrieve their hand.

Players interact both on the board and through their hands. Once someone has built a house, it costs others more to build in the same city. Players choose to generate resources in a province, which allows anyone with a house in that province to gain resources. One of the cards allows a player to use the action on the top of another player's discard pile.

The game is simple to teach, and the cards explain the actions, which make the mechanics easy to learn and recall. The interaction on the board, and random setup of cities keeps the game fresh. The only tricky element to grasp is that victory points are scored by a combination of the kinds of cards in hand and the board state - part way through the game it's better to buy cards for victory points than to continue to build houses. That often throws first-timers. Despite this quibble, I like this game because it combines rules that are easy to learn and recall, with an absorbing raft of decisions as I try to outmaneuver my opponents on the board and beat them to the cards.

I mostly avoid expansions to games, but I like the different Concordia maps, particularly as they tune play for different player counts. For most people, the best way to buy into this game is with Concordia Venus, as it has better maps. (Those on a budget might prefer the original.)

Dominion is a card game, where you gradually build up a “dominion” of cards. Each turn you have a subset of your dominion in your hand, some of it is in your draw pile, some in a your discard pile. When your draw pile is empty, you shuffle your discard pile and transfer it to your draw pile (similar to Magic the Gathering). The art of the game is to get the right combination of cards that will allow you to gain victory point cards rapidly. But since the victory point cards are useless otherwise, too many of them can gum up your hand.

The game's mechanics are very simple to learn, but there's a lot of subtlety in playing well. There's also a lot of variety. The base game comes with 25 kinds of “kingdom” cards, of which you only use 10 per game. The combinations of 10 from 25 results in lots of different game-play, even without the many expansions that add more kinds of kingdom cards to choose from. Like many modern games, it's designed from the start with expansions, so they don't feel bolted on when you play. So far we've got Intrigue and Seaside and enjoyed what they add to game.

The length works well too - as a shorter game you can get a few games in an evening, or as a filler with another game. The fact that it's just cards makes it a good travel game - you can also take just a subset of the cards to reduce the size further.

(The base and Intrigue sets were recently upgraded to a second edition. The amazon links here refer to this edition, but since most discussion on BGG is on the page for the first edition, I've kept that link to first edition. If you're buying a new game, do ensure you get the second edition.)

Formosa Tea is a game based on a production process, similar to Viticulture but with tea instead of wine. Players harvest raw tea, put it through production processes to create green, oolong, or black tea, and sell the processed tea to fulfill orders.

My brief description reveals an unexceptional overall structure, but lurking inside are some nifty little mechanisms that give a the game an engaging appeal. Harvesting gains you some tea, but also advances every player's meeple in the corresponding processing plant, leading to analysis of how to take advantage of other people's position. Similarly the market of available contracts shows not just the usual list of a few contracts to choose from, but a grid that shows that satisfying one contract allows the next one to be available for the other players. These little twists yield a design that stands above the pack of mid-weight Euros.

The theme says we're building a city out of Ginkgo trees, but the game is really a rather abstract game that combines familiar mechanisms in an original way. Each turn players place a tile onto the growing city, indicating possession of a tile that either expands the city outwards, or grows columns of tiles upwards. The tiles in the city come in three colors, forming regions of orthogonally linked colors. Placing a tile over another one will increase your count for area majorities of these regions, but you may also may change the color of the column, causing the regions to split or fuse together. This yields a dynamic area control game.

Together with this, as you place over a tile, you're able to add a card to your tableau, either giving you a new ability or a route for more victory point scoring. And not just does this game combine area control and tableau building, it also adds drafting of cards that determine where you may place tiles in each round.

The resulting rules are pretty easy to communicate - you only have three actions to chose from in your turn - but their interaction is rather subtle. This unusual interaction makes this a game that many people find quite tricky to teach, but once you get it, the game flows well and has a lot of depth.

(I take part in an in-depth review of the game on the Heavy Cardboard podcast.)

At first blush, Glass Road, is a typical generic eurogame. I start with bare building area, on which I need to acquire and build buildings. These buildings allow me to gather and convert resources, which get more buildings, and thus more victory points. Resource conversion, buying building for resources, the usual Euro tale.

But Glass Road adds some twists that made me buy it after playing it a couple of times. Resource tracking and conversion is done with a unique dial, one that keeps track of my charcoal, clay, and bricks - making it easy to convert one of each of the raw materials into the final brick. The catch is that if I can convert, I must - so getting a charcoal may force me to create a brick, thus losing one of the two clays I'd earmarked to buy another building.

The other great twist is the action selection mechanism. Each building round I pick five cards from a deck of fifteen. During the building round I'll select three of them to play, but if someone else plays a card that's in my hand, I get to do one of its actions. This is a great interaction mechanism: I need to guess what others might do so I can gain some extra actions. Together with the competition to buy the available buildings, this yields a game that feels much less like a solitaire than many Euros.

All this, and it's a short playing time too, a three player game takes just an hour, yet with much of the depth of longer games. The end comes quickly too, the buildings tempt you with the promise of a powerful tableau, but there's never enough time to build all the things you dream of.

When I first heard that Hegemony was a game based on academic theories of political economy, intended in part as a teaching tool, I didn't have high expectations of it as a game. On playing it, however, I was impressed. Each player plays a social class (working class, middle class, capitalists, or the state) engaging in competition to fulfill their aspirations. The players are very asymmetric, which each class having not just different goals but also a different palette of actions, making each class a distinct play experience - much more so that asymmetric games offering just a special player power. This asymmetry makes the game more complex, as each player is playing by somewhat different rules, but the theme makes everyone's play understandable, making the game much easier to learn than is typical for a game with asymmetric actions. The theme is deeply embedded, so playing the game raises many ideas about how economies work and how its mechanisms affect different social groups.

In the theme of Istanbul you a merchant moving around the Bazaar, trying to gain rubies by picking up goods in your cart, selling goods in the market, gambling in a tea house, visiting a mosque, and bailing a family member out of the police station. The bazaar is represented by a game surface of 4 by 4 grid, which you move around. Each tile on the grid represents a different place, and the skill in the game comes from picking a good set of movements that will get your rubies quicker than the other players. The grid is laid out randomly with each game, which forces you to rethink your strategy with each play.

The result is a delightful middle-weight Eurogame, complex enough to be absorbing, but easy to learn and play. The movement mechanic works very well with the bazaar theme.

What most impresses me about this game is how it balances several familiar mechanisms. The game begins with some tiles laid out between the players, each of which has a bunch of meeples. By placing a meeple on a tile, you get to use its action - usually to gain a resource. So that's Worker Placement. But you can also use your meeples to bid on a tile: an auction mechanic. The winner of the auction gets the tile added to their village, so you have neat tension between using tiles and bidding for tiles. There's also a tile-laying mechanic as you place them in your village.

The tiles both generate resources and, using resources, can be upgraded to both improve the resource generation and to score victory points. Tiles vary from game to game, so the puzzle of how to optimize the village to get the best score changes with each game.

But however well you optimize your village, you can only score based on your planning by winning the auctions for the scoring tiles in the final turns. This cranks up the interaction - and the tension. In the final turns I'm both battling to set up the paths that will generate the big points, and competing in the auction to get the tiles to score those paths. All in all a great balance of planning and improvisation.

This game involves placing houses onto a shared terrain board. Each turn you draw a card showing one of five terrains you can build on, you then put five houses onto that terrain, putting them next to an existing house if you can. During the game you can get markers that allow you extra placements or moves of existing houses.

It's a simple token-laying competition, but the game's strength comes from its variability. There are several player boards, and you take four of them at random and place them at random to get a different playing area. The extra placement tokens are different each time. But above all, the victory conditions that everyone is working towards vary. There are ten possible victory condition cards, and you pick three of them for each game. So while one game rewards you for getting lots of houses on a single row, another rewards you for getting the largest single conglomeration, and another getting an balanced number of houses over the four tiles.

I like that great variability, with simple rules, and a short playing time.

In 1755 a massive earthquake struck the city of Lisbon. As well as damage from the quake, there were the inevitable followers of tsunami and fire. Over 80% of Lisbon was destroyed. This game uses the rebuilding of the city as its theme, one that's fascinated its designer, Vital Lacerda, a Lisbon native. The result is typical of Lacerda's style, a rich game with many interlocking mechanics. Players are constantly, if indirectly, jostling with each other, inevitably bringing to mind some carefully crafted clockwork mechanism.

The primary purpose is to build stores in the center of Lisbon, and open public buildings next to those stores to drive traffic to them and thus score wigs. (Yes, victory points are wigs, which were very important to noble Portuguese at that time.) Also important are getting favorable decrees from the prime minister, which provide wigs for having buildings in the right place, or the right kinds of goods. Each turn you play a card from your hand of five, playing either to the royal court to visit the nobles there, or to your player board to gain resources and carry out some trade.

To complement the rich mechanics there is top-notch production values, components are top quality, with plenty of thick cardboard, silky finished board, and solid wooden bits. But better still is the outstanding artwork from Ian O'Toole, all done in the style of 18th Century Portugal with its distinctive Azulejo blue tiles.

Lisboa is a complex game. As well as the tightly-knitted mechanics, there's a lot of icons to digest, with many special powers granted by the church and the ministerial decrees. Consequently it takes at least a full play (or two) to get the hang of it, but I enjoyed exploring the game, they way the mechanisms fit together, the subtle interactions between the players, and the way the mechanisms followed the reconstruction theme.

Lisboa is a very similar game - in its complexity, high production, and thematic integration - to The Gallerist, which is the other Lacerda game I own. I find them very similar in richness and complexity, if choosing between them, I'd pick whichever theme is most interesting to you.

Medici is a classic auction game. Each round a player draws up to 3 cards in sequence, each represents a set of goods with a value and a type. They then put the lot of cards up for auction, the winner putting the cards in their ships, which may only hold up to five cards. Once all the ships are full, or the goods run out, players score depending on the total value of the goods on their ships and the total amount of a type of goods acquired over the three rounds in the game.

Simple to learn, but full of the captivating interaction that auctions provide. A particular bonus for Medici is that it handles 6 players, which makes it a perfect choice for a deep 6 player game that's over in an hour or so.

Medici is one of what is often referred to as Knizia's auction trio - three highly regarded games by Reiner Knizia. The other two are Ra and Modern Art. All three are must-haves in my collection.

Metro is a tile placement game where you build up a very surreal Parisian metro system. Each turn you take a tile and place it onto the board, with the fun element that your aim is to build the longest routes, requiring lots of wiggles, in order to score the most points.\

Modern Art is a classic auction game (originally published in 1992) by Reiner Knizia. Each player has a hand of cards, each of which represents a work of art by one of five artists. Each turn a player offers a work of art for auction, and the winner of the auction adds it to their display. Once one artist has their fifth picture offered for auction, the season ends. Each player now gets money for their displayed pictures, where the value of each picture depends on how many works of that artist were offerred in that season, and in earlier seasons (the game plays over four seasons). The winner is the player with the most money.

The fascinating element in this game is there is no intrinsic difference in value between one artist or another, it all depends on what art players decide to offer for auction. When I'm offering art, I'm thinking if I can get a good price for it now, or will I do better by keeping it in my hand and hoping it will become a more valuable picture later on. When I'm bidding I know I'm giving money to the seller, but at what price is it worth me taking picture, and what's the chances it will be a top work this season? There's a simple arbitrariness to how these values evolve over the game, that delivers a fascinating dynamic, even if I weren't invested in the outcome.

If deciding which art to sell, and how much to pay, isn't enough, there's the extra twist that each painting has a code indicating one of five different auction types that should be used to sell it. So once I've decided on the artist, I then have to think whether it's better to sell the blind auction picture, or the one to be sold with an English auction?

The theme of the game, and its status as a classic game, has encouraged some imaginative productions. The earlier versions were workmanlike, but recent productions have included some really interesting art on the cards for auction. The pictured production is the latest English-language one, done by CMON, with a clutch of mostly Brazilian artists. The latest German language version, by Oink, features several interesting modern Japanese artists (and is also an excellent size for travel). Since the rules are so straightforward, it's easy to play with a foreign language version, and there a number of foreign productions that I'd love to get my hands on.

Modern Art is a must-buy if you enjoy auctions. While Knizia's other classic Ra is a touch more flexible in its combination of set-collection and auctions, and his Medici supports 6 players, there's nothing that matches the table-talk of Modern Art, as you can have great fun fluffing up the picture you're offering for sale.

I've tried a few cooperative games (where the players work together to beat the game), but Pandemic is the one that we own and like the best.

Each player plays a health worker who travels around the world trying to find cures for four diseases before they get out of control or you run out time. The players have to balance effort on finding the cures versus fighting disease outbreaks. Each player gets a random specialist role with particular skills that can be brought to bear; each game will involve a different combination of specialists. There's also randomness in where the disease outbreaks occur and how the outbreaks divide amongst different diseases. You have some ability to make the game more difficult as the players get better at the game.

There is a newer edition to the game from the one that we have, although the changes seem relatively minor. We bought the “On the Brink” extension that increases the number players to 5, adds some more rule variations, and provides cool petri dishes to store your disease cubes. (Other extensions can increase the player count further, but we haven't tried them.)

There is another cooperative game by the same designer called Forbidden Island. This has identical mechanics to Pandemic but with a different theme. Our feeling is that if you have of these games it isn't worth getting the other one.

Pax Pamir is set in the area around Afghanistan, during “The Great Game” - the period in the mid nineteenth century when the British and Russian empires battled for influence. But in this game the focus isn't on them, but on the folks in the middle. Each player plays a faction of Afghans, keen to use the Great Powers for their own ends.

Each turn, a player takes two actions, most often to buy a card, representing an important historical figure, or to play one into your tableau. Playing a card allows you to increase your influence on the map, possibly with tribes loyal to you, but more by adding blocks of the power (Britain, Russian, or Afghan nationalist) that you're currently loyal to. I say “currently loyal” because you can easily shift your loyalty depending on how the game is going. In a recent game three of us were each allied to a different power. An opponent made his Russians dominant on the board as a game scoring event loomed, so I switched sides to the Russians. When the scoring event occurred, the Russian dominance meant that only the players who were loyal to the Russians scored victory points, and I'd managed to provide a valuable gift to my new overlords and thus slide ahead of him on loyalty to the Tsar.

This sea of shifting alliances makes Pax Pamir an intensely thematic game. The alignment of players to the three powers causes the game to change its feel strikingly even in a single play. Three players each loyal to a different power feels like an area control battle on the map. Two versus one has the single trying to avoid a dominant power so they can score more in the alternative scoring for a fragmented state. And all players can be allied with the same dominant power vying for who can be seen as the most loyal.

This second edition has greatly streamlined the rules, making it a very different game to the first edition, as well far better flowing than most “Pax” games. The production is a clear labor of love, picking up carefully from the history and culture of central Asia.

Although it has elements of wargame and area control, the cleverness of how you can form combinations of the market cards and loyalties means that even some who dislike destructive confrontation have loved this game.

Unsurprisingly, the theme of this game is building up a power generation and distribution company. Each turn you grow the size of your company and supply power to some cities, earning you money to further build your company. As your distribution network gets bigger, you can spend more to upgrade your capability. The game ends once one of the players reaches a certain size.

I like that Power Grid engages three distinct mechanics in the game, which interplay both in your own play and in interaction with other players. Each round these three mechanics come into play:

• A few power stations become available and there is an auction to determine who gets which. You have to decide how important each power station is to you to decide how much of your money to spend on it.
• You buy fuel for your power stations, with prices varying between rounds. You have to decide how much fuel to get, particularly if you want to store fuel for future rounds.
• You extend your distribution network over a map (of Germany or the USA).

You need to keep all three elements in balance by deciding how to allocate your money. You're also in competition with the other players for all of these three resources, so you have to respond to their actions.

I like how the game has just enough randomness in what power stations come up for auction to keep the game flowing with a mixed ability group. There's less variety between games than other Eurogames, but enough richness in the way that the mechanics interact that I keep wanting to play. On the whole the nice balanced elements of the game make me put it on the top of a list of Eurogames to get once you've got into them.

Puerto Rico has long been one of the prime strategic eurogames, spending several years at the #1 position on Board Game Geeks's game rankings. It's a game that rewards strategic thinking, and there's a lot of indirect conflict between players. Although more recent games (Agricola, Dominion) have challenged its leading role as a strategic eurograme, it's still one of my favorites.

The theme of the game is building up a Caribbean estate. Each turn allows you to add plantations, buildings into your town, recruit colonists (a euphemism if I ever heard one), and produce, sell, or ship the resulting goods. Puerto Rico introduced an innovative turn mechanism where each person chooses a type of action to do in their turn, which they and everyone else carries out. There are more actions than turns, so the flow of actions through the game is both varied and subject to tactical choice.

There's hardly any randomness in the game, which increases the value of strategic thinking. There's also a lot of contention: limited buildings you can build, limited slots for selling and shipping goods. The strategy also depends on recognizing that early in the game money is essential to build up your production facilities, but steadily emphasis shifts so by the late stages of the game the focus in on victory points. Managing that shift is essential to doing well in the game.

Ra is one of the classic auction games of Reiner Knizia. Players take turns drawing tiles from a bag. Each tile either goes into a lot of scoring tiles, or onto the Ra track that counts down to the end of an epoch. As the bag goes around there are auctions for the lot of scoring tiles. Players bid using sun tokens, which are numbered from 1 to 13. Each player starts with a set of sun tokens with one left over on the board. Each auction gives each player one chance to bid, if so putting forward one of her sun tokens. The highest sun token bid, wins the auction, the lot of scoring tiles, and swaps the winning sun token for the one on the board, receiving that sun token face down so it can't be used until the next epoch. At the end of the epoch, everyone scores from their scoring tiles, which combine in interesting patterns to build up points.

What I love about this game is that it's a stream of tricky decisions. How valuable is this lot to me? Should I call an auction in the hope that others will use up their sun tiles early in the epoch? She should like this lot, and has 3 and 12 sun tile - should I bid my 7 in the hope she'll use up her 12 now? Do I bid my 11 tile to get this flood tile, or do I hope I can also pick up a pharaoh tile later since there's still several tiles to come on the Ra track? The mix of tiles make valuation difficult, so most of the tension is about timing. Do I try to win this lot now, or wait for something better later?

Ra is an easy game to teach, with only a few rules. It plays easily in an hour or so, making it an excellent filler game. The theme is fun, but of no relevance to the gameplay. I have the new Windrider edition, which is reasonably criticized for being rather expensive for the components you get. I do like the art style of this edition over the previous versions, and felt that its price was worth it for the many plays I expect over the years to come. Ra is one of those classic games that still feels fresh, although it's nearly two decades old.

If you like Ra you should also take a look at the other classic Knizia auction games: Medici and Modern Art. All three are must-haves in my collection.

Race for the Galaxy is a tableau-building card game. Each turn you may draw cards, build cards into a tableau in front of you, and use the cards in your tableau to gain resources to build more cards and score victory points. Its mechanics are much influenced by San Juan, indeed I see it as San Juan with lots more richness, options and thus complexity.

Like San Juan, Race for the Galaxy uses the mechanism from Puerto Rico where each player chooses an action to occur during the turn carried out by all players. The difference with San Juan is that there are many more cards to choose from, and also more actions that can happen. With so many cards, Race for the Galaxy introduces an ideographic system to explain what the cards do. Learning the ideograms is crucial to understanding what to do during the game, this appeals to some players but is a turn-off to others (similar to Caylus).

This open-endedness also means there's a lot of variation between plays. The essence of the game is working to get the best out of the random cards that come your way, forming a strategy to make best advantage of your early cards, but being able to tune that strategy depending on the cards you get later. The card draws introduce plenty of randomness into the game.

Like most tableau card games, this is a good travel game. The cards are easy to carry and you only need space for the tableau on your table.

Race for the Galaxy plays quickly because everyone does their turns simultaneously, at least once people have learned the ideograms.

We got the first two extensions which add more players, more cards, and some more game-play. They seem to work well, although I've not played with them as much as I'd like.

Rococo takes blends familiar mechanisms into the quintessential mid-weight euro. Set in a theme of tailors creating elaborate costumes for a Louis IV ball, players contest to hire workers to carry out actions, buy fabric, buy patterns to combine these fabrics into costumes, and place those costumes for area majorities in the rooms of Versailles. The result is a game that's combines moderate rules with plenty of player interaction as we compete for these different facilities. The Eagle-Gryphon production, with Ian O'Toole's art, while expensive, is lavish - providing a luxurious experience to go with the smooth flow of the gameplay.

The player's goal is to fill a 4 by 5 grid of squares with attractively colored dice, such that dice cannot be next to each other if they have the same digit or color. Each round rolls enough dice for everyone to snake-draft two dice for their grid, which must be placed next to existing dice. The randomly chosen grids also have some spaces marked with required colors or numbers. Scoring objectives are randomly drawn for each game.

The center of this game is the puzzle of how to build up the grid to maximize your points, but not box yourself in for the future. Interaction is limited to the draft, which adds some tension and perhaps an occasional block. The mechanism of drafting tiles into a personal tableau with various constraints and scoring rules is a common one, but I've not found one that does it as well or as attractively as this.

San Juan is a card game whose theme and some mechanics are borrowed from Puerto Rico. It's main mechanic is a tableau-building card game. Each turn you may draw some cards, choose to build some cards into your tableau, and use the cards in your tableau to build resources getting you more cards. At the end of the game your victory points are based on what you have in your tableau. From Puerto Rico it borrows the mechanic of each player choosing an action for all players to do during the turn.

Although the theme and many of the buildings are strikingly similar to Puerto Rico, I find San Juan quite a different game to play. It's a good deal less intense (hence my lower complexity rating), has more randomness (due to the card draws), and plays much more quickly. I don't think that there would be a high correlation between liking Puerto Rico and liking San Juan.

San Juan is very similar to Race for the Galaxy in mechanics, but significantly less complex. There are far fewer cards to learn in San Juan, so you can get a handle on the options more quickly.

San Juan has become a favorite travel game. The cards fit into a small pouch and you don't need much table space to play it, so we've enjoyed it in cafes, bars, and economy class flights.

Scythe appeared in a blaze of excitement in 2016, starting with a spectacularly successful kickstarter campaign, and shooting into the top 10 of Board Game Geek's rankings. Such excitement creates a torrent of expectations making it hard for reviewers to be objective about the game.

Despite the box cover depicting mechs in battle, this isn't a wargame. Like most Eurogrames, it is a development efficiency game, mostly about stringing together actions to create resources and use them to improve your position, snowballing into a winning position. Unlike almost all Euros, there is combat, but while it is a constant threat, battle doesn't happen very often, and it's resolved through a simple blind auction, with no scope for combat tactics.

As a development efficiency game, I've been enjoying it a lot. I'm thinking about how to maneuver my workers around the map to get hold of the right resources, deciding what to build to improve my empire, and coordinating both with an action pairing mechanism that allows me to take two actions of a particular type together. Each player plays with one of five faction and one of five player mats, the combination of which provides different player powers for each game. It took me a few plays to realize that it's a race game, if I dally in building up my position the game will end suddenly with my plans half-formed. Interaction with other players is limited, but I do have to keep an eye on what they are up to, particularly as the end of the game appears on the horizon. This interplay of economy building and map-maneuvering reminds me of Terra Mystica, but I find Scythe to be more streamlined, easier to teach and remember.

The game is beautiful, which is appropriate as the seed of the game was the game designer's love of the artist's work. The board is magnificent, the cards have lovely illustrations. The components are generally high quality, even though I didn't indulge in the extra bling that's available. While this quality does increase the price, I do appreciate a high-art game like this.

Seize the Bean has a well-realized theme of running a coffee shop in Berlin, in a game that deftly mixes deck and tableau building. The customers are the deck building element, I add new customers from a card market to my clientele, and each round I draw some of them into my line. I must then serve them using resources I obtain in my two actions. If I think I have enough resources, I can use my actions instead to upgrade my coffee shop, making my actions more powerful and serving customers with less resources. The choice between adding exposed brickwork to attract hipsters and getting more milk for the tourists is one of the regular decisions in the game.

These customers and upgrades come from six groups, such as hipsters, cyclists, or party goers. In my first half-dozen plays I'm still figuring out how to best combine these six, knowing that once they get familiar there's another twenty in the box to keep me puzzled.

One caution is whether combining the deck building with a card market may introduce too much luck. Investing in exposed brickwork is futile if no hipsters appear in the card market. You also really need a player aid to explain the icons (there's one you can print out from BGG's files).

As well as the gameplay, Seize the Bean has lovely production, with resin sugar cubes and lots of individually illustrated cards that poke gentle fun at the coffee sippers of Berlin. Euro games wisely tend to prioritize dry gameplay over theme, so it's nice to find a game that does both with such wry fun.

“Settlers” is the game that introduced many people (including me) to Eurogames. Playing it involves an abstraction of settling an island. Each round players acquire resources, which they can use to build structures, which allow them to gain more resources. There's more interaction between players than in many eurogames with Settlers due to trading of resources.

The game is quick to learn and play well, which makes it an excellent gateway game into eurogames. (Ticket to Ride is a touch simpler.) The island is dealt out randomly, so the various configurations provide replay variety. Resources appear based on die-rolls, which adds an effective amount of randomness to the game.

We've played this game a lot and my rating my well be lower than it deserves due to over-familiarity.

I'm very happy that Jeff Patton gave this game to me (a thank-you for writing a forward for User Story Mapping). It fills that handy spot for a game that plays pretty quickly, is simple to learn, yet is absorbing enough that you usually want to play again.

The game primarily a tableau building game where you build your tableau based on three sets of four cards revealed in a market. To buy cards you use a combination of chips and the cards already in your tableau, the most valuable cards costing more. The chips and cards yield money in five different jewels (currencies) and the art of the game is deciding what jewels to build up in your tableau to both score victory points and to help you buy more valuable cards. The theme of the game talks about building up a jewelry store, but this theme is wafer thin - so would not appeal to those who dislike more abstract games.

This is also a game which is an example of the pleasure of nice components - the chips are sturdy casino chips. Everyone that's played remarks on how they somehow make the game more fun than a functionally equivalent yet cheaper alternative.

Steampunk Rally is a racing game where each player takes on the role of a famous late 19th century inventor. Each turn you draft cards to parts like coal bunkers, antigrav devices, or arachnolegs to a wild and whacky steampunk machine; and then race it through an alpine race track. Racing involves a clever use of die rolling, which despite lots of dice, doesn't feel too much like a luck fest as you convert heat into electricity to make those arachnolegs propel you along the race track.

The art work and components are excellent, bringing the right amount of humor into a light, fun game. I liked that they worked hard to get the cast of inventors to be a diverse bunch (with the best excuse I could imagine for having Ada Lovelace take part several decades after her death).

I got this as a light game that could scale to lots of players. Since everyone carries out their moves simultaneously, the game shouldn't drag with lots of players. The game is fun, but its biggest problem is that there isn't much interaction between the players. Each round I'm concentrating on my own machine and how to convert the dice into the power I need, but there's little opportunity to care about what everyone else is doing. All in all it ends up as a bunch of entertaining but solitary puzzles, sadly unable to deliver on the promise of the theme.

The quickest way for me to describe this (assuming you know the allusions) is a cross between Sim City and Alhambra. Like Alhambra each player buys tiles from a common market area and builds them in their individual zone. Naturally, given the name, these zones are suburbs in Suburbia, the tiles are things like housing developments, factories, and casinos. The art of the game is choosing the right tiles to buy, and placing them in your suburb to maximize their impact.

The main difference, for me, between Suburbia and Alhambra is that the there are lots more ways in which the tiles interact. You don't want to place a Freeway tile next to a residential tile, but gain by putting it next to a commercial tile. In addition as the game develops you are increasing both your suburb's income and its reputation, the latter becoming more important as the game goes on. You also have a random selection of tiles for each game, which adds a lot to the replayability.

I like this game a lot for its theme, which is fun, and that it strikes that nice balance between rules that are simple to learn yet absorbing to play.

(I recommend removing the Casino and PR Firm tiles unless you have an experienced group. See gaming forums for the background on this controversy.)

This is a recent purchase for us, after playing with some friends who had it. What appealed to me was the different feel of this game compared to most Eurogames - with a more central role of direct conflict in the game.

Each turn a player moves either ward bosses or immigrant groups into New York's wards - the immigrant group move giving political favor chips for that group. Every four turns you have an election where player face off in each ward for an election, the winner often decided by who spends the most favors in that ward. It's these periodic elections which provide the unusual level of direct conflict.

The game also has lots of room for dealmaking (I won't go into your ward if..., I'll let you win this ward's election if you let me win....). This dealmaking further adds to the high player interactivity forced by the elections. (Although we have only played it a couple of times and the dealmaking wasn't that high, I feel it would be much higher with players who gravitate to that.)

So although it's too early for me really to know how much I like this game, I am drawn by its different rhythm to most of the other games we have.

In Terra Mystica each player plays a race of magical people who are settling a land by building and upgrading settlements on a hex-mapped terrain. Terra Mystica is a good fit for people who dislike randomness in their games: there is a little randomness in the setup of the game, but that is all. Furthermore there's no hidden information either, factors that make this game a similar game to Agricola.

Significantly different to the other low-randomness games in my list is the faction mechanism to increase replayability. The players select from a set of fourteen factions (races), each of which has its own special powers. Your choice of faction, in combination with your opponents', has a huge affect on your strategy and leads to a lot of variation between different plays.

A downside to this game is the amount of rules to absorb. There are many nice mechanics in this game, but they all combine to make it a lot to learn. This complexity also leads to a long game, I've read it takes 30 minutes per player, but I'd double that until you're more familiar with the game than we are. At that length, we've found it dragging towards the end with four players, despite the close finishes. My biggest peeve with the game is that the victory points are fiddly to score, so that it's easy to forget to score some, and then be unsure if you did later on. Consequently It's easy for the margin of victory to be less than the margin of error of forgotten VPs.

That said it's an absorbing game, and most people we've played it with have enjoyed it, even with a single game. My sense is that if you play often the volume of rules and the fiddly scoring cease to be a problem, which explains it's very high ranking on BGG. I, however, don't play enough to see these effects, so it doesn't fit as well for my gaming habits.

(Recently the designers of Terra Mystica have come up with a new game: The Gaia Project, which is effectively a second edition of Terra Mystica. If you're thinking of getting Terra Mystica, you should probably get Gaia Project instead.)

The Gallerist has a rich theme of running an art gallery. You develop your gallery by discovering artists, buying art, boosting the fame of the artist to drive up the art's value, finding a buyer, and selling the art. Unlike most Eurogames the theme comes through very strongly, similarly to Tikal and Viticulture.

As well as the strong theme, the game offers a rich set of mechanics, similar to Agricola and Terra Mystica. There are many interactions between the elements of the game, which can make learning it a challenge early on. The “buy art” action doesn't just involve exchanging money for art — new visitors enter the plaza, the artist's fame goes up, the player gains tickets to encourage visitors to the gallery. Even after half-a-dozen games I have to keep referring to the player aid to ensure I don't forget a step. But the complexity is worthwhile because the mechanics interact like a well-built clock and the theme drives how they fit together. So even in the first game there is a lot of fun just exploring how the game works. There is some randomness to the initial setup, which together with the many paths to explore gives the game a lot of replayability. During the game itself, however, there is only marginal randomness (this is the biggest contrast to Viticulture).

The components are particularly well produced, very thick cardboard, a distinctive graphical design (suited to the theme), and a clear rule book to explain the clockwork mechanism. The designer, Vital Lacerda, is well-known for these rich simulation games with these mechanisms, and I'd certainly like to try more of his work. I think you'd enjoy this game if you liked the hard thinking from a game of Terra Mystica or Agricola, or if you enjoyed the strong theme of Viticulture but would prefer something with less luck.

(A more detailed comparison with Viticulture.)

The Great Zimbabwe is set on the African Savannah where tribes compete to build temples and manufacture the ritual goods necessary for temples to grow in stature. It's played on a simple modular map, yielding a logistics puzzle to figure out how to get the needed goods to the right temple.

This game does a particularly good job of symbiotic interaction: to raise a temple, I'm going to need to buy goods from another player, thus improving their position. The resources for the ritual goods are limited, so winning the auction for turn order so I can build first is important. And a last puzzle is when to choosing which god to worship, as each one gives unique powers to its follower.

The Great Zimbabwe is published by Splotter Spellen, a highly regarded small publisher known for games that are deep and unforgiving of errors. A single mistake can easily cost me the game. I prefer it over other Splotter games I've tried because it's relatively rules-light and quick to play, which makes its unforgiving nature more forgivable.

Like other Splotter games, this game charges a deluxe price for mediocre components and artwork. For me, The Great Zimbabwe's clever gameplay outweighs that nuisance.

The Quest for El Dorado is a fine blend of two classic boardgame mechanisms: racing and deck building. Each player is an explorer starting at one end of a track made from combining a selection of tiles. Each tile is divided into hexes of jungle, desert, and water. To move you play cards from your deck. Everyone's hand starts out pretty weak, so you have to decide whether to defer your movement in order to buy more capable cards. Taking a turn out to do that, forgoes some movement, but you'll go faster in the future. That balancing act, and deciding what cards and when in the track to get them, puts this game into the exalted company of Knizia's best games.

The Ruhr immerses its players in the growth of the coal trade on the Ruhr river in 18th Century. Each player runs a barge, which they use to deliver coal to various locations on the river. The linear nature of the river, together with the significant complication when moving up-river, provides an interesting twist to a pick-up-and-deliver mechanism.

Sadly, the game doesn't have that much more to offer. There's a tech track of sorts, but the different routes on it aren't that interesting. The rules are just that bit too fiddly to be worthwhile for the gameplay. A caveat to my view is that I've only played it at two, but I didn't see how it would improve much with more players, and after a few games, I don't have any desire to play it any more.

Despite hearing high praise of this game, I knew it could never be for me due to one overwhelming problem - it only plays at three, and thus would hardly ever get on my table. But that was before I played it, and now feel this game, despite its limitations, has a special place in my collection.

Its flow resembles games that use worker placement for a production process, such as Viticulture. My workers, called generals, recruit an army, train that army, equip it, and send it to the field. But these generals use their point score for an auction to use the worker placement spot, so that my 3-point general might be outbid to train an army by an opponent's 4 point general, unless I up my bid with another 2 point general.

Then once my army goes to the field, it goes with a general, to another worker place auction to win a campaign. Winning means I get to occupy a province for the rest of the game, yielding victory points every round, but the general stays with the army, meaning I lose a worker for the rest of the game, as well as having to supply the army with gold and rice.

Each faction has around twenty of these generals, of which you play with only half-a-dozen each game. Each general has separate scores for military and administrative skills and a special ability. So each game you have to work out how best to utilize the set of generals you get on this particular play.

As well as the mechanical qualities, the game also carries a robust historical theme. It's based on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the great works of Chinese literature, with the generals drawn from characters in the story, telling the history of the rivalry to found a new dynasty on the ashes of the Han. I may not get to play this often, but it will be high of my list when I have a few hours with exactly two heavy-game players.

Through the Desert is truly an abstract game, the desert and the appealing pastel camels have no bearing on play at all. The aim is to place camels to build long lines or enclose areas. We haven't played this game too much, perhaps due to its abstract nature, but I feel it deserves more table time than we've given it so far.

Thunderbirds is a cooperative game, design by Matt Leacock, who is the designer of Pandemic. The players form a team of rescuers, who cooperate to help people caught in various disasters around a sci-fi future world. Like Pandemic, the game mixes solving short term puzzles - getting the right mix of people and devices to mount each rescue - with a long term challenge, which comes in the form of a series of plots from baddie “The Hood”. Players win by foiling The Hood's plans, but can lose not just if he succeeds, but also if any of the disasters aren't saved before time runs out.

This mix of short and long term goals is similar to Pandemic, but I find the gameplay different enough to be worthwhile. This game is all about logistics, we need Virgil and the Mole in North America to deal with this disaster, but can we get them there and also get Gordon to the South Atlantic to deal with another one in time? Dealing with a disaster requires a die roll, but the odds are greatly helped by having the right people and equipment present. So do we risk rolling the die now, effectively losing an action, or try to get Lady Penelope there for a +3 bonus?

This variation in gameplay means I'm happy to have this game in addition to Pandemic, but the true appeal of this game to the buyer depends on how you relate to the theme. Thunderbirds is a British children's sci-fi show from the 60's, one of a remarkable series of “supermarionation” shows from Gerry Anderson. For Brits of a certain age (or those that got to know the repeats) the theme may be irresistible. But those who never had that joy will probably find the theme unfamiliar enough to be off-putting. My American friends have enjoyed the game when played with me and other Brits, but I doubt they'd feel it was appealing on their own.

Thurn and Taxis was a princely house that played a big role in starting postal services in the 16th century. The theme of the game is building up a postal network over a map of central Europe. Each turn a player draws a card from an open deck and tries to make a hand of linked towns on the map. Cashing in these hands leads to victory points in various combinations.

Ticket to Ride occupies a special place in our game collection due to how it manages to be an interesting game with a remarkably low complexity. The game mechanics are simple to explain and pick up - it's ideal for non-gamers and younger children. Yet despite its lack of strategic depth, it's still an enjoyable game for more intense gamers.

You start with a map of the US, on which there are various rail routes. To ride these routes you have to draw matching colors of cards from a draw pile. Each turn you can draw some cards, claim a route, or acquire tickets that detail longer routes. You score points for claiming routes and fulfilling tickets. The latter are only revealed at the end, thus keeping people unsure who is winning.

Ticket to Ride has rightly been a very successful game, and has spawned a bunch of variant games. These are their own games, not expansions.

I'm usually wary of spin-offs of popular games. Often they are designed after the original success and I'd rather get a new game completely. But I'm happy to have made an exception with Ticket to Ride Europe (which is a variant of Ticket to Ride). I find the Europe version does just enough to make it a different game, while preserving the key mechanics from its original. In general I prefer to play the Europe version although I like having the original for new people.

I got this game partly to try a Kiesling/Kramer game, but mostly because of the cool theme of uncovering Mayan temples. Each turn a player uncovers a section on a map, perhaps revealing a temple or treasures. You then have ten action points to expend on moving your workers, uncovering temple layers, or gathering treasures. At periodic intervals you score based on the temples you control and the treasures you've got.

We've had TransAmerica for a while, and it remains one my favorite short games. Play is on a map of america where each player secretly has five cities that need to be connected into the railway network. Each turn a player build two railway segments, but unlike most railway games there is only one communal rail network that players extend to reach their cities. I like the way that this element adds a twist to the game tactics - you have to think about how to best use what everyone else is doing.

I like to describe the primary mechanism in Troyes as “Dice Stealing”. Each round players roll a bunch of dice that they'll use to activate various actions spaces on the board. While it's good to roll high, in that you can do more actions with higher numbers, your opponents can just pay a couple of deniers to buy that lovely six from you.

The actions you can do are mix of actions printed on the board and seeded by a set of random cards. Much of the game is forging a good combination between these actions to provide the resources of money and influence and turn these into victory points for the end of the game. You'll also use dice to place workers in buildings that give you dice to roll in the next round.

The central dice mechanism is the key to this game, and the overall play is fairly straightforward. The art is reasonable but nothing remarkable, an assessment that I can place on the game as a whole. It is easy to teach, and absorbing to play, without getting lost in unnecessary intricacy. While not a game I would rush to suggest, it's a solid choice that I'm happy to have on my shelf.

Each player plays a viking group indulging in trading, raiding, and settling across a map of dark ages Europe. The theme and some nice mechanics make for an enjoyable game, but not one that we've dug out that often. We have the original Ragnar version of the game.

Viticulture is a worker placement game arranged around a theme of building a winery. The primary path is to acquire vines, plant them, harvest them, turn the grapes into wine, and fulfill wine orders to get victory points. Each cycle occurs in two phases: summer and winter with planting occurring in summer, and harvesting and later stages in the winter. So as you allocate your workers you have to be thinking about what to do in each phase.

The game has a quite a bit of randomness due to the card draws: both the wine orders and the vines you can plant come from card draws. There are also visitor cards that give various bonuses. This randomness makes the game lighter, but there's still plenty of decisions to make. The components are very good: attractive artwork and nicely made wooden pieces. The theme comes through particularly well for a Eurogame, in my collection.

We have the “Essential Edition”, which is the one that's available now. It includes a number of extensions to earlier editions, and the game would not be as good without them. We also got hold of the Tuscany expansion. I usually take a dim view of expansions, preferring to buy a new game, but this one is so good that now we wouldn't play without it. Base Viticulture is a fine game, but if you like it you absolutely should get Tuscany.

If the game feels too light or random, but you like the worker placement mechanic and agricultural theme, then you should take a look at Agricola. If you fancy a heavier game with a rich production theme, try The Gallerist. If you'd like a game of similar weight and theme, but with more interesting mechanisms, try Formosa Tea.

(A more detailed comparison with The Gallerist.)

Wildcatters is a game set in the oil business. Each player is an oil major and spends a turn creating oil wells and rail transport links in some part of the world. You win by shipping oil to refineries, gaining area majorities for refined oil in different parts of the world.

Wildcatters is a great example of a business game with a mix of cooperation and competition. You can't properly develop an oil region on your own, so you have to pick how you will choose your combinations of cooperation with others to get ahead. This forces a dynamic game, where you have to react effectively to the everyone else's moves.

I have the second (Capstone) edition. In the first edition, the general view was that the game was only worth playing with four players. Due to covid-19, we've mostly played this second edition with two, and it works reasonably well with some dummy companies. While it is a good game with two, my impression (based on one play so far) is that it jumps up a notch when four are playing.

If this kind of game interests you, I'd strongly recommend going with Brass first, as I think that's an overall better-designed game. But if you like Brass and are looking for something similar, then Wildcatters is a great choice.

Yin Yang was a unusual discovery for me, I ran into it when Heavy Cardboard asked me to stream it with them after they discovered it at Essen. It's not an easy game to get hold of, but is worth a look if you see it around.

The core of the gameplay is moving your monk around a map of China in the Warring States period. Each turn you get a take three or more actions on the map, some combination of: move by road, move by water, build a temple in the location you're in, or pick up a good from the location you're in. These actions are partly generated by acquiring chits during the game and most memorably by tossing a set of yin-yang coins in a metal tortoiseshell that's as unnecessary as it's fun.

At the start of the game, there's lots of open towns to build temples on and goods to collect, but as the game continues, things get enjoyably tighter and more competitive. Building temples is a battle for area control in the ancient Chinese kingdoms. Meanwhile the goods you collect need to be added to a grid, where their arrangement drives what elements of the game will score for you.

The result is a game with simple rules, but absorbing puzzles. The setting, provided by the map and coin-shaking, raises the game into something more memorable than its simplicity might suggest.

(I did a more detailed review of this on the Heavy Cardboard podcast)

Yokohama is a worker movement game, building up a trading business in Meiji era Japan. The board consists of various tiles that are dealt out in a different way each game. Each round you place a number of assistants on the board. You then move your president, who is constrained to move only through tiles that you have an assistant on, and should avoid tiles with other presidents. The tile the president finishes on is the action the player performs, the power of action depending on how many assistants the player has placed on that tile.

I enjoy the worker movement mechanism as it provides an interesting spatial element to the strategy as you need to plan out a series of moves to maximize how much you can get done.

The game is very much a point-salad, with lots of ways to get points and thus many different directions everyone can go. Do they want to gain points by fulfilling contracts for combinations of tea, copper, fish, and silk? Or perhaps score for building trading houses on cards, or visiting the church or customs house. Such open scoring games aren't usually my preference, but this one does click for me - I think because of the core worker movement mechanism. There's a lot of variety between plays, not just do the tiles appear in different positions, there's also various chits randomly dealt out on the cards. There's also a little engine building, as you can put shops on tiles to boost the power of your actions there.