Top 10 Board Games of 2018

hi I'm Adam Porter and this is my board gaming vlog and today we're reviewing the year 2018 and as the year comes to a close I'm looking back at what I've enjoyed over the year which games have come to the forefront for me obviously particular highlights of this year has been the release of pick cocoa my trick-taking game which I've covered a lot in previous videos so if you're interested in having a look at that please go back and look at those it's also been nice to see doodle rush continue to to do well as have a big German release recently but really I'm here to talk about games that are not by me or one other I have one coming up early in the new year throne which is a trick-taking game which uses dice so that's coming from whiz kids that's one of my designs coming up in the new year and hopefully one or two others next year maybe but there's other stuff in the pipeline too but as I say that's not what we're here to talk about today today I'm going to give you my top 10 games of the year and actually I found 2018 a an unusual year in that I haven't had that many games that have sort of left out to me and I'm sort of screamed for my attention and so as a result the first three games on the list are actually reprints of older games but they are lavish reprints these are games that have had a total overhaul in terms of their graphics and components even though the gameplay has stayed identical and they are excellent games so my number 10 my number 9 and my number 8 are all games which would feature much much higher in the list if there were new releases but I think it's fairer to give the higher spots to the brand new games so let's make a start with number 10 which is a re-release and that game is the Pyramid of Penguin from brain games [Music] in pyramid of penguin one player takes the role of the mummy all other players play as treasure hunters and treasure hunters are racing to retrieve five magical items from the pyramid The Mummy wins by catching treasure hunters and taking their life tokens the board sits between the players so that the mummy can see one side and the treasure hunters can see the other crucially the mummy cannot see where the treasure hunters are located but the hunters can see where the mummy is at all times this is achieved through clever use of these neat magnet pieces on a treasure hunters turn they roll the dice setting aside any which show a mummy they can reroll as often as they like until they're happy with the result always setting aside any mummies that they've rolled the player then chooses one of the dice results and moves accordingly if they land on one of their required treasures they reveal the card and this gets them closer to winning the game but it also reveals their current location to the mummy on the mummies turn they roll the mummy die and they add any dice which have been set aside by the hunters because they show the mummy symbol this shows how far they can move and if they catch a hunter their turn ends immediately and the mummy takes a life token from that hunter the hunter is placed into the sarcophagus space on a hunter's turn they do have the option of resetting the mummy dice which are currently set aside but if they do this the mummy immediately gets an extra turn the game ends if a hunter wins by getting their fifth required treasure or if the mummy collects a certain number of life tokens so the first game I'm going to talk about is the reprint of a game called flug der mummy is called pyramid of pain Queen now and it's by brain games who you can see I've worked with on Doodle rush and on pic Coco so I'm a fan of brain games I was a fan of bring news before I worked on them with those games hence me offering those games to them but pyramid of pain Queen is a fantastic family game and it's a hidden movement game so I used to love the game Scotland Yard when I was a kid and I think when I was a kid I would have loved pyramid of penguin as well now Dapeng queen is one of those family games which has quite a few gamey sort of aspects to it re rolling of dice and clever little mechanisms and so there's a certain degree of complexity there which makes it entertaining for adults as well there are some real choices and very suspenseful moments because in this game we're not just sort of hiding one player's information and writing down where they are and this sort of thing as you would in Scotland Yard and it hasn't blown up into the complexity of things like letters from Whitechapel and fury of Dracula no this is mega simple but you can actually see the movement of that mummy you can see where the mummies going and you're trying to avoid them that creates this real tension it's hugely satisfying to see those magnets moving around the board as if as if by magic they're moving by themselves it's a great game it always was a great game in its previous version still a great game now I don't think any of the rules have changed it's purely a graphic overhaul but it looks fantastic brilliant for you know for perhaps not extremely young children but children and families and actually plays really well with a group of adults too [Music] in high society each player has a set of eleven money cards in different denominations the game is made up of a series of brief auctions where players attempt to purchase the high scoring luxury cards and avoid the negative disgraced cards at the start of each round a new card is put up for auction and each player in turn plays money cards in an attempt to win a luxury card or passes their turn the winner of the auction takes the luxury card which is worth victory points and discards their money cards that they've spent if the auction card is in fact a disgraced card which is negative then the players bid to avoid taking the card and the first player to pass has to take that card but all other players lose their money cards which they've bid the timing of the game end is unpredictable it comes when the fourth green card is revealed and at this point the player with the least remaining money is eliminated from the game regardless of their score then the highest scorer wins the next game on the list is a Reiner commit see a classic so Reiner committee has produced hundreds and hundreds of games over the years one of the most wealth the most prolific game designer currently working today and the game high society is one of his card game classics now I hadn't actually played high society until I played it this year in this new edition and I've heard about it talked about it before and almost talked about as if it was a slightly sort of sat alongside the game for sale but perhaps similar but not quite as good actually I think it is as good high society is a classic it's a modern classic and this production is absolutely outstanding the artwork on this is amazing the brilliance of this game is the fact that the players have those those money cards but you can't make change so if you're going to spend that $25,000 card you're gonna have to spend twenty five thousand in one transaction you can't spend ten thousand of it or fifteen thousand of it or 17 that no you know spending the twenty five thousand and that makes these really interesting decisions about having to is sometimes you've got over pay or or pay a bit less than you really wanted to because you just don't have the the variety and the denominations of those cards and then that brilliant thing where you eliminate a player who has got you know too little money left that's always fascinating in games when that happens before the final scoring and it happens here the game is simple they could streaming easy to teach looks beautiful plays quick and some real nice tactical decisions I think it's a brilliant brilliant game and it's going to be around for many many years to come in Cuzco players are developing landscapes and building cities and temples and claiming high spots in the different areas of the board in order to score victory points on a player's turn they have six action points to spend they could place terrain onto the board they can bring incas onto the board they can move existing incus that are already on the board they can build temples and score victory points but you can only build or expand a temple if you occupy the highest position in that village it can build pawns and score if the pond is completely surrounded they can draw festival cards and finally they could organize a festival in a temple and when a player organizes a festival all players present in that city bid using festival cards in an attempt to win victory points when the final triple terrain tile is placed the game comes to a close and players score points for each temple if they occupy the highest position in that city and then the highest scorer wins the next game on the list is another reprint and this one is cusco from super meatball and I think is it's pub is distributed and published by other companies in other parts of the world now this is a reprint of an older game called Java which has always been one of my favourite games I think this is an absolute masterpiece it's one of Wolfgang Kramer's very best games krama round Keesling who percent designers now Java is part of a trilogy of games along with Tikal and Mexico so now we've got tikal mexico and cuzco makes up that mask trilogy of games and it's called the mask trilogy because they always had these masks on the box and actually the new games have a little masks on the box alongside the title but they look a bit more modern than this massive Ravensburger box the other games in the sequence are Tikal and Mexico both of which have previously had these fantastic super meeple productions cusco is a an example of that sort of older style of Euro game it does hark back to the early sort of 2000s and what I mean by that is it's got tons of action points and things like that you can you've got a whole menu of choices of things that you can do on your turn and you can do multiple things on your turn which means that the game can slow down because there's a big decision space so if you're playing with analysis paralysis sort of prone players players are going to sit around for a long time and think about their turns then maybe Cusco is not a game for those players so unless you enjoy that unless you're willing to take a long time over it really relax into it but if you'll play with players who are willing to make strategic decisions quickly there's a lot of strategy here there's some really nice I love that aspect of a three-dimensional board where height is important height is more important in this game being on the higher levels that's more important than majority in those different cities and I love that I think that's really really clever the board looks fantastic it always did in Java that's three dimensional terrain but even more so in Cusco with bigger tiles and now we've got those nice resin temples that just really bring the board to life and we've got little Inca shaped meeples rather than just little cylinders I think they were in Java so Cusco another absolutely fantastic production from Super Meat Boy in rolling bandits each player tries to plunder a series of railway wagons in order to earn victory points and special abilities on a player's turn they roll their dice and position matching sets onto carriages if the player has no dice of their own color already on the Train then they must place at the wagon nearest the back of the Train but if they already have dice in a train they can place dice which match the symbols that they placed earlier or place onto the wagons directly in front of their dice that they've already placed if the player has three symbols matching a trunk token then they take that token and gain the bonus shown on the back for example swapping dice or reroll in them if at the start of a player's turn they have dice on a wagon which are equal to the number on that wagon card or that beat it and they have more dice than any other player then they claim that wagon removing it from the table and scoring the points shown in the corner the remaining dice return to their owners when all wagons and finally the locomotive have been stolen then the game ends and highest scorer wins so next game on the list is the first game which is a brand new game for 2018 and that's rolling bandits from blue orange games now this is designed by Brett Gilbert and Trevor Benjamin Brett Gilbert is probably best known for his collaborations with Matthew Dunstan on games like Elysium and Costa Rica and Professor evil on the citizens of time but actually he's frequently collaborated with Trevor Benjamin and they've tended to do the little dice games last year they did cafe fatale from Zac verloc now this game suffered a little bit by comparison with Las Vegas because Las Vegas is a masterful game from rüdiger dawn absolutely brilliant and cafe fatale is a very very good game too but it has a lot of similarities and it's not as good as west of agus and so it kind of fell by the wayside I love it I think it's lovely production I always loved stock verlox games and this was a good one um previous to that AEG made a little game called dice heist from Trevor and Brett a diced heist is fantastic I still think this is the best of their dice games but these two I love the fact they're exploring this little space and I'd love to see these games achiever a bigger appeal and Oh sales you know if small card games can hit those mass-market stores why can't small dice games we still just have Yahtzee floating about in the stores and these games are obviously far far better than Yahtzee and the interesting thing about them is they're not just Yahtzee variants these have real interesting ways of using dice rolling bandits has that brilliant thing of you know you roll your dice and then you've got to position and you've got to decide how you're gonna split them up and where you're gonna place them to try and claim majorities in a similar way to Las Vegas and cafe fatal but actually it's its distant enough that you don't you don't make that connection and so it doesn't suffer from that same comparison it's got a lovely thematic thing of climbing extending along this train and winning those different carriages I played it in early prototype form at Essen a year or two ago with Brett and Trevor I really loved it then I've been looking forward to it coming out and the production from blue/orange as always is top-notch so I can highly recommend rolling bandits simple game easy to teach lots of fun to play quick playing time fantastic [Music] in spring rally each player controls a wind-up car racing around a track in round one each player has five cards in hand in round two and three this number of cards increases the starting player plays a card from their hand then each other player plays a card in turn which matches the color of the first card if possible if not possible then a player can play a card of any color when everyone's play the card the round which is called a trick is resolved if the trick contains only cards of one color then the highest card wins if the trick contains two or three different colors then the player with the highest card in the second or third color played wins the trick and the player who wins the trick moves their car forward a number of spaces equal to the smallest card played in the trick they skip over any occupied spaces without counting them all players other than the winner wind up their spring moving the key one space clockwise and on a future round if a player wins a trick they can also release their spring moving an extra number of spaces equal to the number showing on their spring however if the spring is wound up too far then the bonuses are heavily reduced the game board also features downhill and uphill spaces which give you a boost or move you backwards when you land on them and the game ends when the player crosses the line for a second time and that player wins if you've been watching my channel for a while you know that I love dice games but you also know that I really really love trick-taking games and so the next game on the list is a trick-taking game what's the best trick-taking game of 2018 well obviously it's pick Coco but if you're going to ignore pick Coco and why shouldn't you then the game you want to be playing is spring rally spring rally is from mandu games I don't think anyone was talking about this I've never heard anybody else mention it I found it a lesson and it's brilliant it's a really good trick taking game is beautifully produced it's really really simple simple enough to play with children but with really interesting decisions you know the decisions are adequate for any adult group to play it and enjoy it what it does is it creates this really nice visualization of that trick taking sort of story as these cars move around yes one player is winning early tricks and so there making slow progress around but the other players get that big catch-up boost from those wound up Springs and suddenly they can leap forward at the end so it's a game all about timing when do I release my spring when do I want to win the trick and it's got that brilliant thing where if I wait too long then the bonus from winding up that spring breaks down a little bit and I get a much less of a return the game has a brilliant sense of progression it's so simple it looks so beautiful it doesn't take long to play it's clever it's new I think it's fantastic I think more people should be talking about spring rally in hardback each player starts with their own personal deck of cards each showing a single letter a row of cards is displayed in the center of the table in a central marketplace from which players can purchase additional cards to add to their decks each player draws 5 cards from their deck not a player's turn they spell a word using the cards in their hand discarding any unused cards into their own personal discard pile if they wish the player may flip cards to their reverse sides and use them as wild letters any non wild card which has been used will offer up a benefit either points or special abilities or coins which were used to buy more letter cards or ink tokens newly purchased letter cards are added to a player's discard pile but this is the core benefit of the game because when your deck runs out the discard pile is shuffled and becomes your new deck recycling all the valuable cards that you've collected cards are categorized by genre and will offer special benefits if played together with other cards of a matching genre and at the end of a turn all cards used are added to a player's individual discard pile except for special cards called timeless classic cards these remain in front of the player for future turns and can only be removed if another player uses that letter in a word on their own turn finally ink tokens can be used to push your luck and draw additional cards on your turn but the catch is that each letter card drawn must be used when you make your word otherwise you forfeit your turn the game ends when any player reaches 60 points and a highest score at the end of the game wins number five on the list is hardback now a few years ago Tim Fowler's brought out paperback and it seemed like such a it was if there was a series of deck-building games which tried to do things that that weren't really that were deck-building but we're using whole other stuff so there was that game I think it's called for the crown which was like combining debt building with chess and then there was paperback which combined deck building with Scrabble and that seems such a weird thing but it worked so naturally in paperback in a way that I didn't think it worked when it was combined with chess and paperback was great I think hardback is better I think while paperback is probably simpler there's a lot of barriers in paperback there's a lot of negative play and paperback a lot of attack e cards the the interaction in hardback is much more positive interaction you tend to lay out a card and then anyone else can use that card and that's the sort of interaction we tend to get the set up in paperback was a bit of a bore whereas in hardback we don't have that sort of we don't have to lay out individual different types of cards or different cost they just come up into an open marketplace the ink has a really nice push your luck mechanism in it and it works really well it's simple you generate these ink tokens you can spend them to draw extra cards but you must use those cards in your word otherwise you lose your turn that's a fantastic simple push your luck decision it makes the game feel a little bit like you know games like diamant and and dead man's drawer and you know those sort of push your luck games I've got captain carcass here but that's Dead Man's draw in other areas of fantastic card game I love that combination I feel like hardback has taken paperback and honed it and streamlined it and made it a smoother experience I think the graphic design on it is prettier than paperbacks graphic design I just think the whole thing works better yes maybe there's a degree more complexity to it but the flow is better as a result and it's wholly satisfying as a game then we use of wild cards and let the use of wild cards better in hardback too it is so smooth to just be able to say right I'm gonna have to flip this card and then I can use as any letter but they don't get any benefits from it great I think that's neater cleaner as a design than buying those wild cards that you see in paperback I still think paperbacks great game don't get me wrong I've held on to it I'd like to play paperback from time to time but I think hardback is usually my first choice in Skylands players of building islands in the sky by placing tiles onto their own individual player boards and using the tiles to generate resources which can be used to purchase new tiles or victory points on the player's turn they can take one of four actions but they may not take the same action two turns in a row a player might choose their take tiles action here they draw a selection of tiles and every player takes one of them for their own board but the active player takes two tiles a player might choose to fill their completed islands with people which function as resources and every player will do the same filling one island but the active player fills two islands or a player might spend their resources to purchase a new special tile from a central market these offers special abilities and endgame scouring bonuses and every player does the same but the active player gets a discounted price or a player can transport blue people into their completed cities converting them into victory points and every player does the same transporting blue folk into one city but the active player can transport to two cities or from two blue islands when one player has filled their board except for a single space or tiles or victory points have run out then the game ends and players score points for their completed islands there people tokens there's special scoring tiles and any victory point tokens they've gathered the highest scorer wins number four on the list is my most played game of the 2018 set a same of the 2018 set because the most played game of 2018 is is something else and we'll probably come back to that at the end but my most played game of the 2018 Productions is sky lands and that's because my fiancee absolutely loves it she is we've played it so many times and I think this game has flown under the radar it's a it's a queen games it's a queen games production the artwork on it is avatar sort of like it it feels I don't know there's something a little bit obvious about it but then at least it's not castles and and there's just something about that game which looks a little bit dated but and actually the gameplay isn't hugely innovative either so maybe that's why it hasn't caught people's attention but this is it takes the really fun aspects of Puerto Rico and San Juan that thing when I take an action everybody benefits that's brilliant that should be in more games and it's not in that many games and this is a real gateway level game it's so much simpler than those other games it's got that neat Karkar the familiarity of Carcassonne sort of tile placement where we're matching Islands up and trying to complete areas and only when they complete can we use them to score points and generate resources so that's familiar it's only got four basic actions so it's really easy to teach but the decisions on your turn are interesting because of that San Juan Puerto Rico style action selection where everyone takes a term when I take a turn it means the games flows really fast IRRI sand I get through a game of this a two-player game in 15 minutes we play it two or three times in a row and really enjoy that changing up the tiles a little bit in that central market area so the games feel slightly differently I think the game probably suffers in its basic version I've got all the little Queeny mini expansions that I picked up at Essen I would say if you're gonna buy the game you're gonna want to invest in those Queenie's they're really good they have lots of different scoring systems and ways that change the game and alter it and I think without that the game probably would get tired after a few plays I think you'll get a fair for you out of it and if you treat it like a gateway along the lines of Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne I don't see why this game shouldn't sit on your shelf for years and years and you'll getting loads of fun out of it but those extra tiles really ramp up the tactical choices that you can make in the game the whole thing flows brilliantly it feels like an obvious sort of style of game that should have been made before and yeah III I can't really fault it I think Skylands is flying under the radar and I think it deserves more buzz great gateway game sky dance in ewa dell each player creates a village by laying out cards on the table in front of them some represent buildings some represent characters and on a player's turn they can either place a worker to gather resources or complete an objective or play a card when playing a card this can be taken from the central display or played directly from a player's hand buildings always cost a certain number of resources to play and characters cost berries but they can be played for free if the player has a suitable building to house them in all cards have special abilities one of powers permanent effects in game scoring or unique worker placement spots at the end of each season players gain additional workers and activate many of their cards so the game has a good sense of progression speeding up from round to round and after three complete seasons the players score victory points for the cards in their player area and the highest scorer wins now the next game on the list certainly doesn't suffer from a lack of buzz this one is ever Dell which is from Starling games are they called now I think they've changed their name haven't they recently Starling Games yeah so Starling Games have produced this beautiful sort of wind in the willows type world with all these fantasy little little creatures living in The Woodlands the cards are beautiful the components are beautiful now this was a big kick start a game and I tend to be very suspicious of kickstarter releases and so I kind of ignored it I decided to try out a friend's copy rather than buy it and when I tried it at first I was a little skeptical there's a lot of text on those cards and it's quite small it takes a game or two to really learn what the cards do and then the game starts to flow and pick up pace and you don't feel quite much like you're doing hard work but after a couple of games once you get into that flow it's really satisfying again like Skylands there's nothing innovative here it's just a really neat system done well everything feels balanced everything feels like it works well together the game was a really good sense of progression and there's no I mean a tiny bit of negative interaction but mostly really nice positive interaction between the players I play it a lot two-player again with my fiance Aris we you do find it to players sometimes that that's central marketplace the meadow where all the cards are laid out sometimes that gets a bit static and because there's not people constantly selecting from it I think at three and four players that probably keeps the cards flowing a bit more quickly that can create some frustration because often in this game you're waiting for a particular card to come up because you have that building which which gives you a certain character card for free but only if that character card becomes available to you now while that works really nicely in games like seven wonders and things like that where you can have a card that gives you another card for free without paying the resources that's fine in a game with real quick flow in a game like infidel it can be a little frustrating but that said you've got so many choices of things to do on your turn you know really maybe if you don't focus on that and just treat it as a nice surprise when those cards come up I think that the game can be a real real sort of pleasure to play the production values are outstanding I've now back to the expansion I want all the lavish production as if it wasn't lavish enough this ridiculous tree this ridiculous cardboard tree that serves no purpose whatsoever you slot the deck in here you put some cards on top but really it could just be a board but it gives it a real table presence it feels like something special and I want that from my board games I want them I'm spending a lot of money on these things I want them to pop I want them to feel like that the game comes to life and this brings that woodland to life yes it's a bit of a pain that it blocks vision for some of the players but just put it out the way I mean if you don't need it on the on the central board you can put this to one side a little bit you can make that work or don't bother with it just stick the cards around the edge if you're playing with four players but with players it doesn't get in the way at all and it just looks beautiful and it makes the whole game feel like an event I'm a big fan of F Adele I considered it from a number one spot but it didn't quite make it it made it to where is it number three in blitz Bowl each player has a team of players who face off against an opposing team in a warped violent game of fantasy football except here you don't just gain points by scoring touchdowns you gain them by beating each other senseless injuring your opponents and pulling off ridiculous power moves on a player's turn they take three actions share freely among their team they can run they can mark adjacent opponents they can fight them or pass the ball or bring on reserves whether attempting to beat your opponent's down or throw the ball or just to determine the movement of a bouncing ball the results are always determined by simple dice rolls now after each action a player can claim points if they've achieved an objective which is laid openly on the table the objective card is then taken into hand by the player who can use it later for the special one-off ability shown on the cards reverse and once all the cards have been drawn from the deck the game ends and the highest scorer wins number two on the list this many covers a bit of a surprise to regular viewers of my channel I'm not a big amira trash player that's not the surprise that's the obvious bit number two is an emeritus game it is blitz bowl from Games Workshop now a Games Workshop game on the list is a big surprise to me I haven't played a lot of games workshop's since well for many years as a teenager I played out a lot and I have a huge fond memory of the game blood Bowl and blood Bowl was re-released last year in this new edition it's really nicely made by Games Workshop and that you know the rules have subtly changed but not dramatically this is still an interesting game and an interesting sort of historical artifact and I still have a lot of nostalgia for a game I'd love to play it more frequently but really Blood Bowl is a three hour game you know just for a sing match and really to get the best out of blood Bowl you want to be playing a tournament a league you know a campaign where you're playing multiple games with loads of different players and having league tables and people players are gaining skills I mean I don't have much time to play a three-hour game ever let alone play a whole sequence of them and so Blood Bowl has always been a slight frustration to me blitz mole fixes everything about it and actually blitz Bowl I would say is for me so far this is the best Emeritus game that I've ever played it fixes all the problems that I have with a Meritage games it is quick to play it genuinely could come in at 45 minutes once you know how to play this game even your first game isn't gonna take you more than an hour it's really funny it's satisfying it tells you a really good story but it doesn't just tell you it's not just the cards that say this happens it actually happens you're moving the pieces around the board and you have these funny moments the dice rolls are kept to a minimum yeah the game is there's lots of randomness in it but it's you know combat is a single dice roll it's not a whole sequence of one boring dice roll after another there's it's really easy to play the rules are really simple and streamlined and quick so much more than blood ball you can teach this game so simply and it's so intuitive to play it's got clever use of w's cards with where when you get that card it gives you a benefit you know from on the back and then it's got this really great catch-up mechanism that comes in in the endgame where the really powerful cards start to come up and benefit the underdog the losing player and it keeps that tight tense sort of thing right to the end the miniatures are great there's not loads of them which is perfect because you can paint them take your time on them get to know them it's got expansion cards in there for all your other blood ball figures if you've got them so although they don't come in the box you can expand the game sad thing about this game is it's not available outside of America and Germany I I would have thought that Games Workshop is there you know UK is the home of Games Workshop it would have been lovely to have seen it release over here but actually I got this I ordered it from America from Barnes & Noble got it sent to the UK I probably paid about 20 quid 20 pounds ultimately in in postage and packaging and customs charges and things like that but it still brought in the gamer and affordable price it still brought it in cheaper than I could imagine this game selling on my local game store shelves because the price in America is cheap because it's a target game is 8 1 no it's not targets its barnes & noble it's aimed at the mass market so it's affordable already now I don't know how easy it is to get those companies to ship it was fine for me with Barnes & Noble I think even if you're in the UK even if you're not out of you know where anywhere around the world you know getting it shipped to you I think it's worth it it's a good game in the quacks of credd lingburgh players are filling their cauldrons with various magical ingredients attempting to generate enough income to buy even better ingredients to use in the next round but trying not to push their luck too far by drawing one too many explosive ingredients from their sack each round starts with a random event drawn from a deck of cards and this subtly changes the rules for the round the players who are below in the scoring get a mild leg up in the form of a rat token which partially fills their cauldron making it easier to reach the highest scoring spaces play as them simultaneously drawing comedians from the sack adding them to their own individual cauldrons and ingredients interact in a variety of clever manners but if a player ever goes over the limit of seven points worth of white ingredients then their cauldron explodes and the rewards are severely diminished depending on the space the players reached on their track they received victory points and rubies and money which they can use to buy new ingredients then all ingredients old and new a return to the player sack and the process is repeated in each round the players sacks get more powerful from the various combinations they've created with their various ingredient powers and the game comes with four variants for each color of ingredients so each game feels quite different as the mark of ingredients changes after nine rounds the game ends highest scorer wins and so that leaves my number one of the year which is the quacks of qward lingburgh now this one the Kennish field has Yara's the caller sirs choice on this on the game of the year the German game of the year and nobody had hurt him it really is so they came from nowhere they have Wolfgang washes name on it now Wolfgang Walsh has made quite an impact this year with his games the mind and gang Jean clever which both got nominated for field as Yara's awards he's had a mega year and the cracks of cred Limburg is really interesting and basically it's just really really fun now you're not gonna find deep strategy in this box this is simple simple stuff really it's there's a lot of luck I quite like the fact it feels like the game is kind of reclaiming luck as a as being acceptable in a euro style board game we've got an event deck you turn over a card and this random sort of stuff happens that it takes how you played around normally in a game I would hate that but somehow it feels right here because the game is all about push your luck I mentioned earlier when I was talking about hard back then Buy and draw in diamant I mean cracks of Kremlin Berg it rivals these games possibly even beats them for the best push your luck game there's so much and even when you go bust when you put out too many of those white explosive tiles you've still got stuff to do you're still in the game and I've seen mega comebacks in this game yeah I've seen people fall behind and sometimes a little bit of a runaway leader but I've also seen moments where people come back from so far behind because that luck starts to feed in and the catch-up mechanism is fairly strong and so the players pull back at the end so it's always tense it plays really quickly and the best thing about the game is it's totally customizable it's got all these different tiles with different powers on them I think you could enjoy the game many many many times just using the same selection of tiles because there's so much of that random factor that keeps things tense regardless of the tiles that you've chosen but the fact there are so many tiles means that I don't really mind that there's three or four of them I would probably never want to use I don't I look some of them are think you know that doesn't feel strong it feels like it the cost is too high for the strength of the of the power I can just leave those out you know that there's enough variability in there that I can make the game work the way that I want to play it there's so much scope for expansions in there the games are quick you can bang out two or three games in quick succession it plays brilliantly as a two-player game the production is lovely I think it's I think it's a really really good fun family game and as a simple game you know just for a quick game for gamers works well for that too this is from Schmidt's peeler I think in the u.s.

it's going to be distributed by North Star Games so that's why my game of 2018 quacks of qward Limburg before we finish I mentioned earlier that these were my top 10 games of the year but the most played game of 2018 for me is bunny kingdom from yellow bunny kingdom I have played I can't tell you how many times I played that game this year mostly two-player with my partner but we have introduced that to practically every other person you've ended up playing games with they've all actually they come and they ask because they hear us talk about it so much can we play bunny kingdom can we try buddy kingdom and we're always willing to give it a play I I still find that a deep interesting strategic puzzle I think it's a brilliant card drafting game I think I mean possibly the best card drafting game I I cannot beat my partner at it I constantly try and get close but it's difficult and and and it's interesting and every game I have - you have to try it slightly different strategy based on the cards that you're given and I cannot wait for the new expansion that's coming up which takes it into the skies I had a little demo of that essence peel from yellow and and it looks fantastic so I'm looking forward to that so my game of the year is quacks with Kremlin Berg but my most played game of the year is bunny Kingdom and I kind of that I haven't played it in 2017 because I think it it definitely would have been high on my top 10 of 2017 and unfortunately it didn't make the list because I haven't played it um so 2018 has been a really fun year to play games it's been a difficult year to find games that have sort of attracted my attention but as a result I think the games that I really have sort of got hooked on have been games that I've really really loved and so any of these games on this list I would highly recommend if you enjoyed my video please watch my others my channel is Adams board game Wales I'm on Twitter I'm at board game Wales on BoardGameGeek I'm Adam 78 please watch out for my games coming up this year particularly throne which is coming up early in the new year thanks very much for watching all the best