Jeanne and I have played several games in the library (see prior post). I did a quick walk through for someone who asked for a list of good games. While there are quite a few games that are pretty good, for the walk through, I did a quick selection vs an indepth review of all the games. So here’s the list I provided.
Ace of Aces You’re flying WWI airplanes. Your opponent has a book with pictures of you and you have pictures of their plane. You select a maneuver which has a page number, go to an intermediate page, then the final page to see what your opponent is doing (including shooting at you).
B-Movie Card Games You’re creating a B-Movie. There are 8 or 10 different decks. You lay down a location, characters, and accessories like a whip. Then your opponents throw monsters at your movie to prevent you from creating the best B-Movie.
Bunny Kingdom Very little conflict. Gridded and numbered board. You pick cards and place your bunnies. There are a couple of squatter cards hoping the official card doesn’t come up but mostly there isn’t a way to take over a space that has a bunny on it.
Castles of Burgundy Manage and increase your hold by rolling dice and selecting resources in order to add farm animals and buildings. This is a very well balanced game for 2 players, 3 players, or 4 players.
Cosmic Encounters Take over alien races with skill, no dice rolling. However you’re playing races that modify the core rules. I think this might have influenced the creation of Magic: The Gathering. Core rules then an alien power that changes a rule which makes the game different every time you play.
DC Deck Building Basically drawing cards based on the DC comic universe from the displayed cards using your current cards to ‘take over’ the displayed card. I find this much better than Legendary BTW.
Discoveries of Lewis and Clark Explore the west and gather routes. Gather native tribes to help in gathering routes.
The Doom That Came To Atlantic City Basically reverse Monopoly. The board is set up with two houses on a similar Monopoly style board. You play an old god and create portals by destroying houses. The person with 6 portals to the nether realms wins.
Elder Sign I like all three of the Cthulhu type games (Arkham Horror and Eldritch Horror) but this is the quicker of the three to play. In this one you’re at a portal and trying to block the coming of the elder gods. Arkham Horror takes like 6 hours to play, Eldritch Horror about 3 hours, and Elder Sign about 90 minutes. There is a second edition Arkham Horror we haven’t tried yet so maybe it’s more streamlined.
Epic Tiny There are several different games like dinosaurs, space, strategy, etc. We’ve played the space one several times. Quick and easy to set up and quick to understand. We enjoy these.
Everdell You have workers and are placing them on locations, events, and such to increase your new location.
Five Tribes You place a grid of tiles and then three meeples on each tile. You pick up the three (more or less), drop one on each tile and the last one has to match the color of a meeple on the last tile. Then you collect whatever the color describes.
Formula D This one is cool. You have multiple different dice from a 4 sided up to a 30 sided, each based on a speed of your car (slower is 4, fastest is 30). You have to slow down for corners so you have to drop your speed or you could spin out and end up in the bushes. Pretty fun game.
Gizmos You’re building engines using marbles from a central pot. Whoever has the best engine at the end of the game, wins.
Gloom You’re trying to kill off your ‘family’ by telling horrible stories about their lives based on the cards drawn. These are clear cards with text and pictures so your negative points can be blocked if someone places a positive card over it. Pretty good storytelling type game.
Horrified Actually a game much easier for younger kids. You’re playing one or two classic monsters; invisible man, wolfman, mummy, etc and the villagers are trying to stop you.
Mountains of Madness You’re flying a plane into Antarctica and to the Mountains of Madness. You’ll flip cards and deal with the results.
New York 1901 You’re creating buildings. Over time you can replace your bronze tiles with silver and gold to increase from a small building to a sky scraper.
The Others This is based on the 7 deadly sins. You are trying to defeat the core monster of each of the sins. Lots of setup but it can be fun.
Pandemic Mainly Iberia although Pandemic itself is pretty good with the expansion.
Photosynthesis You are building trees. The sun rotates around the board so you only get points if your trees aren’t blocked by other, taller trees.
The Red Dragon Inn Card game where four folks have returned from an adventure and are in a tavern enjoying the spoils, drinking, and playing cards. The last one to pass out, wins 🙂
Resident Evil This is a card game similar to DC Deck Building or Legendary and does a pretty good job matching the Resident Evil video game.
Robo Rally Kind of computerized where you’re creating paths using cards to move your robot around.
Splendor A pretty simple game. You have three rows of cards. Raw gems, polished gems, and final gems (or jewelry, I forget 🙂 ). You’re building up your cards and gems in order to buy the next and final row of cards. 15 points wins the game.
Star Wars X-Wing A miniatures game but with very large models for some of the games. You have a wheel for movement and at the end of each turn, you could be destroyed.
Talisman You have three realms. An outer, inner, and the final center task to become the ruler of all the realms. You travel around the board (or expansions, I like the City one but the space one is pretty interesting), pick up sufficient gear to beat other players to the center. The main problem here is folks tend to get a lot more than they really need to win so the final encounter is pretty much a done deal. Still a fun game.
The Thing One of several “one of the team is the bad guy” sort of games 🙂 You’re exploring, trying to discover who the bad guy is. If the bad guy escapes on the helicopter, you lose.
Ticket To Ride Mainly Rails and Sails. Train placement to complete routes. The more routes completed, the more points. Rails and Sails lets you place ship routes too on a world map or map of the Great Lakes.
Trains Another deck building type game except you’re building train routes.
Tzolk’in One of the multiple paths to victory type games. You have several wheels that move during the game.
Wings of War WWI air combat. Like X-Wing, you have plans that move around a board. You select your maneuver (three cards) and flip them. At the end, you might get shot down..
Wingspan This is a pretty cool game for the bird cards. Great pictures. You’re trying to attract birds to your location. You get food, eggs, and birds. Most points wins.
Zombicide A zombie game. Lots of setup and lots of expansions. You’re trying to get from point a to point b, collecting keys or whatnot in order to pass into the prison (for example) and defeating zombies. My wife did an excellent job escaping zombies and bringing out the other players where I was at the exit and ready to just abandon everyone. She’s great 😀