21 at the UNO Park Community Center for a request night.

IN: Steve & Sandy, Sean & Quinn, Ethan & Amy, Tony & Rachel, Tim, Armando, Zach, Chris, Nicole, Reimi, Julie, Kate, Rob, Lauren, Danny, Landon, Edward 

Cities (led by Tim) 2024 drafting collaboration between prolific Australian designer, Phil Walker-Harding and Bostonian Dr Steve Finn. The game is played over eight rounds. Each round, players use their workers to collect 1 scoring card, 1 city tile, 1-2 feature tiles, and 2-4 building pieces. City tiles are made up of park spaces, water spaces, and building spaces. Building pieces are placed on building spaces of the same color to form buildings, which can be 1-4 stories high. Whenever a player fulfills an achievement, they place one of their wooden rings on the achievement board. At the end of the game, players add up the points they have gained from all of their scoring cards and achievements. We played in the New York City setting, with public rewards for skyscrapers, Central Park and Avenues.

Point City (led by Nicole) 2023 card-drafting, engine-building game with more than 150 unique building cards, giving players the opportunity to create a completely different city each time it is played. This game is from the same team that designed Point Salad, but is a much deeper strategic and tactical game that packs a wallop with only a large deck of cards. The rules are simple: Take two adjacent cards from the dynamic city grid and add them to your expanding city. Use your resource cards and bonuses to construct building cards that require specific combinations. Build special civic structures to multiply your city’s points and be the top urban planner! The game takes the same simple concept of drafting cards and building the best combinations, then adds new layers of resource management and engine building to the mix — making the game easy to learn, but challenging for everyone! Think of Point City as a cross between Point Salad and Splendor – with elements of both.

Dice Miner (led by Sean) 2021 dice rolling and drafting game (with a push your luck aspect) where players are Dwarf heroes with variable powers, drafting dice for their hoard. In each of three rounds, custom dice are rolled onto the mountain.  Scores are tallied after each round before players re-roll their dice and the mountain is refilled. Ultimately it is a game about drafting the dice players covet, adding them to their hoard, and pushing their luck to build combos and score as many points as they can. ….and there’s beer involved. The Kickstarter deluxe version has a plastic mountain, dice cup and extra character tiles.

Dune Imperium (led by Zach) 2020 deck building game that adds a hidden information angle to traditional worker placement. It finds inspiration in elements and characters from the Dune legacy. As a leader of one of the Great Houses of the Landsraad, players raise their banner and marshal their forces and spies. War is coming, and at the center of the conflict is Arrakis – Dune, the desert planet. Players start with a unique leader card, as well as a deck identical to those of your opponents. As players acquire cards and build their deck, their choices will define strengths and weaknesses. Cards allow players to send their Agents to certain spaces on the game board, so one’s deck evolves affecting  your strategy. Players might become more powerful militarily, able to deploy more troops than your opponents or one might acquire cards that give an edge with the four political factions represented in the game: the Emperor, the Spacing Guild, the Bene Gesserit, and the Fremen. Unlike many deck building games, players don’t play their entire hand in one turn as they draw a hand of cards at the start of every round and alternate with other players, taking one Agent turn at a time (playing one card to send one of your Agents to the game board). When it’s a player’s turn and run out of Agents a Reveal turn will be taken – revealing the rest of one’s cards, which will provide Persuasion and Swords. Persuasion is used to acquire more cards, and Swords help troops fight for the current round’s rewards as shown on the revealed Conflict card. Defeat one’s rivals in combat, shrewdly navigate the political factions, and acquire precious cards. The Spice must flow to lead your House to victory!

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/316554/dune-imperium

Century Golem: Call for Adventure (led by Tony) The Century Golem Edition has a base game as well as two stand-alone expansions – Eastern Mountains and An Endless World – which can result in 7 different game variations. We tried the combination of the base Century Golem Edition with the Golem Eastern Mountains stand-alone expansion to great success, as the game uses elements of both and forces players to reimagine the game’s strategy & tactics.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/232832/century-golem-edition

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/283619/century-golem-edition-eastern-mountains

The Crew – The Quest for Planet Nine (led by Ethan) 2019  co-operative trick-taking game where the players set out as astronauts on an uncertain space adventure. The eventful journey through space extends over 50 exciting missions. But this game can only be defeated by meeting common individual tasks of each player. In order to meet the varied challenges communication is essential in the team. But this is more difficult than expected in space. With each mission the game becomes more difficult. After each mission the game can be paused and continued later. During each mission it is not the number of tricks but the right tricks at the right time that count. The team completes a mission only if every single player is successful in fulfilling their tasks.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/284083/the-crew-the-quest-for-planet-nine

Kavango (led by Sean) 2024 drafting and set collection games where players are conservation experts embarking on a rewilding journey as they transform their own unique landscape into a thriving nature reserve. Over three fast-paced rounds of simultaneous turns and card drafting, players will build a flourishing ecosystem. As players grow their nature reserve, they must complete research tasks to earn money to invest in protection and provide a haven for vulnerable and endangered animals. As the game progresses, player’s choices become harder and strategy more complex as they aim to build the highest scoring nature reserve.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/387515/kavango

Cafe Baras (led by Tim) 2024 card drafting, tableau-building game by the creative team behind Creature Comforts. Players are coffee shop owners trying to put together a delicious menu and decorate their shop to capture the perfect aesthetic.  Each turn, a card is played from everyone’s hand, either buying it as a food, drink, or decor item for their café or serving the customer on the card and earning money. If players meet a customer’s needs completely, they become a Regular and earn extra end game VPs!

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/406498/cafe-baras

Rebirth (led by Tim)  2024 Reiner Knizia tile laying game with a double-sided mapboard (for both Scotland and Ireland). Each turn, players draw a tile from their supply and place it strategically on the board. These tiles represent your clan’s contribution to rebuilding the land. The game rewards strategic foresight and clever tactical play, with tougher decisions emerging over the course of a relatively short game that tends to elicit repeat plays. Points are scored for chains of food farms & energy farms, residences, castles controlled, as well as private goals achieved through cathedrals. We played the Scotland side of the mapboard.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/417197/rebirth

Rainbow (led by Nicole) 2024 single deck quick playing hand management card game from Japan. Players play solo cards, sets, or runs to win points on cards in the center of the table. The cards that were played in the previous round are the NEW points available to win in the next round. Most points at the end of the game wins! 

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/415090/rainbow

Dominion (led by Armando) 2009 Donald S Vaccarino designed deck-building game, where each player starts with an identical, small deck of cards and attempts to build an efficient engine. In the center of the table is a selection of other cards the players can “buy” as they can afford them. Through their selection of cards to buy, and how they play their hands as they draw them, the players construct their deck on the fly, striving for the most efficient path to victory points by game end. Dominion won the SdJ game of the year award in 2009 as well as recently being inducted into BGG’s Hall of Fame.

Kronologic: Paris 1920 (led by K-ban) 2024 deduction game where players try to unravel a series of unexplained affairs at the Paris Opera to reestablish the truth. Collect clues about the movements of the implicated characters by determining where they were at the time of the incident. On a player’s turn they select one of 6 rooms and align it with either one of 6 suspects or one of 6 time periods. The characters and time period cards have windows  that reveal both one piece of information to be shared with the group and one clue only for the player on turn. The first to correctly solve the crime (suspect, location and time interval) wins. If you like deduction games, this will be in your wheelhouse. The game comes with 3 scenarios, each with 5 cases to solve. The publisher has added 3 more scenarios for download as print and play.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/402111/kronologic-paris-1920

Coloretto (led by Sean) 2003 Michael Schacht (Web of Power, Lucky Numbers, Zooloretto, Drive, Valdora) card game of set collecting with a push your luck mechanic. Players either draw a card to play to a row, or take a row of cards to add them to their collection. A row can have at most three cards, so at some point everyone is forced to take a row. Once all the rows have been claimed, players start a new round, drawing or taking once again. Players are trying to collect huge sets – but only in three colors, as every color beyond the third will cost players points. Jokers are highly-prized, as they always match what players want, and +2 cards provide sure points, giving players a back-up plan if everything goes wrong in collecting colors. Once only a few cards remain in the deck, the round ends and everyone tallies their score, choosing three colors of cards to score positively while any other colors counts negatively. Each color is scored using a triangular number system: the first card in a color is ±1 point, the second card is ±2 points, and so on. The player with the high score wins!

Steve