The VERY BEST Strategy Games – What makes a game TRULY strategic?

many of the oldest board games in the world were neither games of skill nor games of chance but games of Destiny Okay so maybe we would call them games of chance but though they involved dice or the precursor to dice throwing sticks it's possible they were played because of what their outcomes said about a person's Destiny in the afterlife we don't even know how many of these ancient games like Senate were played but we do have a relic of these religious and morality-based board games that you may be familiar with Shoots and Ladders this is a re-theming of snakes and ladders and if we know anything about snakes they're often associated with temptation and pain that's exactly what the snakes in the original medieval Indian game maksha Patman represented commit acts of violence and you'll be sure to suffer the consequences there is one problem with these dice games however and no it's not your modern complaint about Shoots and Ladders that they lack agency in controlling your own choices rather it's that the lesson of morality is undermined by using what has come to be known as an instrument of gambling and greed but if you trace the history of board games up to the point where dice are removed a morally abstaining game isn't all you get consider the medieval Indian war game of chaturanga in this game the role of the dice determined what type of soldier you can move but under pressure of Hindu and Buddhist morality a few changes were made to the game first the level of violence in the game was lessened instead of slaying the Raja all you need to do to win now is Corner him or leave him no means Escape secondly dice would no longer govern which piece a player could move but it would come down to a player's own choice their own free will you might call it hints chaturanga became chess and it rapidly spread over the entire world as its diceless gameplay invited players into its ingrossing depth of strategy [Music] yeah that's not to say chess is the oldest strategy board game there are the Mancala games from Africa and there's go from China but of all strategy games the evolution of Chess is perhaps the easiest to trace so in this video we'll discuss the definition of strategy and we'll investigate more recent developments in the history of board games I'll give you five of the best modern strategy board games available today and by the way if you enjoyed this introduction then credit is due to Tristan Donovan and his book it's all a game which I used as my primary source if you're interested in this book I'll be sure to leave information and a link in the description as well as information how you can get your hands on this shirt which is of my own design and represents the evolution of board games and parallel to the history of man so links for both of those are in the description this video is the fifth in a series about how i rate board games the first is about the rating system I use that of theme mechanics components strategy and complexity and then the following three videos are about the attributes that precede this one so if you aren't caught up go ahead and check those out and if you are caught up stay tuned for the next video about complexity now let's turn our attention to the topic of strategy where the best place to begin is with a definition there are actually entire books dedicated to defining strategy and it may come as a surprise but their primary concern is actually not board games it's Business Development who would have thought anyway the first thing you can look at strategy is the etymology of the word where strategy literally means the art of the general or the art of that which is spread out meaning that strategy requires a high level of orchestration and vision now I went a little further than this and did some more research into several videos and the best definition I could find actually came from this YouTube video and it reads as follows strategy is the process of creating a set of well-aligned activities with the aim of occupying a valuable position in a competitive landscape now if you check out that video he breaks down the definition into three parts first when he says well aligned activities he describes activities as tactics and I think delineating between tactics and strategy is a big deal tactics are single activities and aligning them together is what comprises a strategy his second focus is what it means to occupy a valuable position because no two people can occupy the same position rather a position has to capitalize on one's individual and unique strengths their available resources and their capacity to sustain that advantage over their competitors the fact that a person or a player has a unique advantage over their competitors is something that is especially relevant when we look in the context of board games and then the final focus is competitive landscape which necessarily implies that the landscape is dynamic and as such the same strategy won't work every single time one has to maintain some level of awareness and adaptability to keep their strategy ahead of the game now the reason this particular definition is helpful is because I as is the case in business many games are called strategic and yet they're missing an element of what makes a game truly and deeply strategic for example many people would Define strategy as the likelihood that a more skilled player will win but as I briefly mentioned earlier activities that can help a player gain the upper hand against an opponent are simply tactics and you can exercise a different tactic from one round to the next what separates tactics from strategy is whether or not they can be cohesive across the whole of the game for me personally as a reviewer this means that when I'm raiding a game on its strategy I found several games that require skill in order to win and yet because they're lacking that delineation between tactics and strategy I don't give them the highest possible rating out of a 10.

what about defining strategy as the absence of luck that's the case in every abstract strategy game there's chess and go and Amazons and not to mention many faux thematic games like Santorini and Battleship and hey that's my fish and Boop and for these games I am not going to say that they are not purely strategic they certainly are and when I rate them I rate them as perfect tens however there are hundreds or thousands of games like that and for this video I said I would name five so I want the five games in this video to be special and for that I'm going to lean on this part of the definition of a valuable position that of having an advantage over your opponent that is unique to you because all of these games with the exception of Santorini if you're playing God Powers every player starts in the exact same position no one has any unique ability they acquire that as they play through the game but the the skill of being able to identify your strengths and develop a strategy that capitalizes on that is missing from these games I don't think that takes away from the strategy element but all five of these games do have that little something extra one last thing before I go into the list and some honorable mentions it's 2023 and if you're watching this video you're probably looking for recommendations of games to buy so I'm going to leave off games that aren't for sale anymore they're out of print I think Antiquity is an excellent game but you're gonna have a really hard time finding that I think Nippon is wonderful you can play that online and check out a link in the description but you can't find that also the game food chain magnate probably embodies this definition more than any other game on this list however it's an extremely Cut Throat game so whenever I recommend it I have to recommend it with reservations so I'm not going to leave that on there and then if you know anything about me I am always trying to focus my recommendations on games that I don't think get the attention that they deserve so a game like Scythe I I think Scythe is wonderful I can hear the people already in the comments saying what about Scythe but everybody and their mom knows about Scythe I don't need to mention Scythe it's a great game it's not on this list but there are five games that are on this list so let's talk about them now the first game is the game revive revive is a campaign Style game about Reviving the planet after a cataclysmic event so a slightly evolved humanoid emerges from underground and starts to repopulate the surface of the planet now in this game every player begins with a player board that gives them specific strengths and advantages that they can unlock during the course of the game that there is that valuable position that position that applies only to you now gameplay itself is done by performing actions and the actions are paid for by resources that are acquired by playing cards onto your player board now make no mistake there is a lot of luck surrounding what cards are made available during the game as well as other benefits that can be acquired but at the core of this game every player is in pursuit of objectives that are specific and capitalize on their own unique strengths so the way this is done is at the beginning of the game every player receives their objective card that tells them what they're going to be able to score at the end of the game and then how they play determines what multipliers are applied on each of those objectives revive is an extremely synergistic game where the best player is going to be the one who figures out a way to tie all of their strengths together into one unified strategy the next game is cryo in cryo players are surviving after their spaceship crash lands on a dangerous planet where the atmosphere becomes uninhabitable at dusk so in order to survive the players Must Escape underground but their crew is all cryogenically frozen So at their command are drones and this is a worker placement game where on each player's turn they can take a drone and place it on one of the action spaces on the board which represents the uh wreckage of the ship and where they're Scavenging for useful items and they're bringing it back to their own sort of uh headquarters that they've established and building up an engine a game engine that's going to help them transport cryopods underground the form of transportation that's utilized in this game comes in cards and these cards have four uses the central artwork on the card illustrates a mode of transportation for transporting these cryopods but the other benefits can be used depending on how the card is played if you play the card at the top of your board you get the cards upgrade ability if you play the card on the left side of the board you get the cards scoring objective or at any time you can discard the card and take it for the scrapped resources so like revive this game does have an element of luck since there is card drawing but because every card has four possible usages there is a lot of directions that you can go in this is a game where you can go in a very diverse number of ways and how you play is going to affect everybody else as well my next recommendation is Autobahn in Autobahn players are working competitively together to build the German highway system now in this game there is a lot going on and I have already done a full-length review that talks about how to play and I'll be sure to leave links to that so rather than go on it length about the mechanics and the tactics involved in this game let's focus on the essence of what makes this game so strategic see in Autobahn you don't start the game off with a individual player power rather as you complete tasks to build the Autobahn and whether that's building new routes or upgrading routes or building service stations or even Trucking as you're doing this you're going to have opportunities to promote employees in your company and as employees promote they receive more victory points for completing more tasks of a similar nature so once you sort of set down a certain course let's suppose that you start Trucking you'll be more and more incentivized to focus on that strategy and so with players all doing this together there's a really interesting dynamic between players because together the Autobahn has to be completed but players can do this by specializing in a certain aspect of the Autobahn and if they do this well and if they acquire upgrades that will complement their strategy than the player who does that best is the one that's going to come out ahead so there are really many different ways to play and how you play the game really does depend on how well you adapt to what other players are doing as well I think it's a wonderful game Autobahn the next game has been recently relaunched although its original format is a bit older in fact it may even be old enough that for many people it's fallen off of their radar or many people have never even maybe played this game before but I would call it a classic the game today is Ultimate railroads and what ultimate railroads is a re-boxing of the original Russian railroads which includes the original game and the expansions American railroads and German railroads as well as many improved components now I should also add that I don't actually own a hard copy of this game but I play it all the time on board game arena which I think is a specially conducive to the game because it handles all of the scoring for you automatically anyway regardless of what map you're playing Russian German American you're always going to have three railroad tracks that you can build on as well as a development track on your own personal board now this is a pure worker placement game the only thing that you will do on your turn is place a worker and perform an action the spaces in each game are always identical as well the only variability in every game are the available Engineers that you can hire and those are set up face up at the beginning of the game so that everyone knows what's going to be available after the initial setup there is no element of luck for the rest of the game so I guess in that sense this is the most chess-like of all of those games players don't start with a unique ability they they are all starting from the same place but as they Advance on one track or another they're going to be gaining additional benefits Innovations bonuses that are going to uh amplify their gameplay so you are going to get entrenched in one strategy but the real challenge in this game is that every space is available to one worker and one worker only so the uh the interaction among players as they bid for spaces or as they race to take the first player in this game is very very intense this game has a lot of emphasis on the the limitation of worker spaces now the only the only really way you can get around that is by hiring Engineers hiring an engineer creates a space for a worker that is available to you and you alone this is a game where you're going to wish you could do everything but in order to be successful you really have to prioritize effectively and be responsive to how other people are prioritizing those limited player spaces so I just think it's a fantastic game it's the kind of game I just play over and over again I always have a turn-based game going on board game arena so I'll leave a link in the description if you want to check that out the last game and possibly my number one recommendation for a purely strategic board game maybe aside from food chain magnet is Carnegie now in Carnegie this is a kind of a complicated game to explain I did do a full length review about this game so I'll be sure to make links available for that but essentially this is a game where you are going to be taking actions from workers on your own uh company board and the actions that are available to you are the Departments that you build into your company so every player is going to have a different company with different strengths and many of these actions are going to allow them to place a worker onto the map which represents the different regions of the United States and for every turn players are going to have the opportunity to bring in income from one of these regions and when a player makes this selection everybody gets to share this benefit but only if they have an employee in that region so you've you have to focus on what other people are doing because in order to cap relies on that income you want to be in the same places as your opponents I think this game is just so rich in strategy it's another one that's available on board game arena by the way although in this case I do have a hard copy of it I love it so very much worth checking out and worth watching the longer full-length review that's the game Carnegie so those are my top five strategy games that I think really get at the essence of pure strategy I'm interested to continue this dialogue about what strategy is and how it can be best embodied in board games of course I'm always participating in those comments down below and to check out more strategy games you can always go to the perfectboard game.com use that perfect board game formula to emphasize strategy and see what comes up in your search results or even rate a few games there yourself thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time bye