Our Best 9 Board Games of 2021 - By Board Of It

0:00 hi everyone tally and farrell here from budavit and our dog sven is also here but he's on the floor at the moment welcome to our top nine games of the year video we're in november at the moment so we're not quite at the end of the year but we wanted to do this video now as perhaps it would be a useful holiday guide gift guide for certain people to know which games we really rated that were released this year and just feeling reflective coming towards the end of the year and we probably won't get any more gains for the rest of this year so we might as well do this video now and like i said it could be helpful to people in terms of being a gift guide as you can see we're feeling very festive we've got our christmas jumper and shirt on we're drinking a little christmas beer brew in danish it's very delicious but uh farrell why don't you say a bit about the games that went through the nomination process for this top nine yes so obviously another aspect of this video looking back in the year is to assess the cult of the new of 2021 so we've tried to we've tried to be sensible and keep games that came out in 2021 but obviously as many as you will know board games is a bit of a weird thing for release dates uh you know you have all kinds of stuff like maybe a game comes out in german and then it's not released in english until the next year or

1:31 you know you have a limited first print run and maybe almost nobody gets a copy and then it's not fully printed till the next year so which year do you consider lying if nobody could play it and then you know you even have classic stuff like a kickstarter promises to fulfill one year so that goes on this bgg release date but then actually fulfills the next year so i think there are some examples of those on our list but we'll uh single them out and you know you also have reprints uh and second editions and things like that which is a whole another issue but we've tried to be generally sensible about it so there won't be any games that we discovered this year but they came out in 2018 have been readily available since uh so yeah yeah sticking to the ones that were let's say widely available yeah so without further ado i think we'll go through the top nine backwards and i think ladies can go first yeah so we're doing this we have a separate top nine actually we should say so actually importantly we have no idea what the other expert enlisted yeah we came up with a list of all the games that kind of fit in the categories we just said uh not categories but in the category of 2021 including some of the stuff we just said but we did all this separately and we have no idea what the other supports is going to be interesting it is going to be

3:01 really interesting well i i can predict you're number one really i i'm not sure i know what you're number one i don't think i know my number one you said that you memorized this list yeah i did but anytime i make it up as i go along okay so starting at number nine then my number nine is micro macro crime city so just to give a little bit of info about micro macro we're not going to talk too much about the games that we say about here just give a little introduction sentence because we've actually talked about a lot of these games in our monthly look back videos but it's essentially um a detective game very light very fun you have a big map and you're trying to figure out cases and the map is in you call it real time i guess i don't know it's like yeah it's like time dependent so the whole city is a kind of scene but that's constantly progressing so you can track one person as they go about their day yeah exactly and the reason i've put this on my list is i think it is super unique and novel uh i didn't envisage a visit a game that would be like that uh it's very funny that actually features a lot in my top nine actually funny it's quick to play really enjoy just playing it on a sunday afternoon or something when we have a spare it could

4:33 be 15 minutes to 30 minutes just to whip out micro macro and have a quick game and solve a few cases and yeah i think that's about it it deserves to be on the top nine because of those reasons but not higher than that because i suppose the good things about it are also the negative things is kind of quick it can be over quite quickly yeah and so that's it's why it's not highlighted my list you can't reply it would be yes you can't replay yep so i'll just add in um that i think it's a really good game i like it and just with the whole year thing i think it might have been this is the game that might have been released last year but it wasn't widely available to this year and it became really popular this year but if you don't accept that then we're talking about the sequel full house which did come out this year we've got a get out clause yeah so full house in that case what's your number nine so my number nine is hadrian's wall ah all right okay did you think it would be higher i think i did think that would be higher yeah so i think the ones at the bottom of my list are going to be ones that i really liked that i think i have a few glaring issues with and that's kind of why yeah and then the higher up it gets the less issues i have with them maybe okay as much as i like them so hadrian's wool is a heavy flip and right where you're building hadrian's wall and you have two big sheets of paper and you have physical resources all over the

6:03 place and you're randomly told how many of which you're going to get at the beginning of a round and then you kind of feed them into the sheet so you usually spend one to cross out one box but sometimes those boxes will give you more resources and then you try and kind of continue as long as you can and there's all kind of tracks and mini games and you can develop the town associated with the wall but i think what i really like about it is that it's we tend to prefer heavier games and it's a very well not very heavy but it's a heavy roll and right and it's just really well done i think we really like the chunk of it it's nice because it has actual components so it's the first rolling right with play that feels like a full tabletop game because you spread out all these components everywhere and you're taking them and using them there's a lot to explore in all of the different tracks and so i think i just generally like the way it feels when you play because you mostly play in your head in a kind of constant stream of conscious consciousness because you're it's like you okay so i'm going to spend this cross that out that i get that but then i'm going to put that over there so i cross that and there's no time for stopping if you know what i mean just it's really peaceful to play because you stay in your head yeah but the reason it's at the bottom is it just has a few issues i think number one is that because you have all these tracks and stuff by the time you get to 20 or 30 plays i think you

7:33 have discovered all and i think it has diminishing returns after a certain point yeah and i think as well some of the tracks aren't equal some of them will almost entirely just continuously give rewards while others will seem to you have a lot of hard work and you don't get too much back and then finally it's it can go up to six players but i would never ever ever play with anyone i didn't live with or like a family member because it's the most uninteractive unsocializing game i've ever played you literally it's detrimental to the game if you have a conversation with someone because it breaks your flow yeah so it would never be a game that people would come over and i would get out as much as i love it so yeah i guess we should also say there are games obviously we got this year that didn't make it onto this list at all so even though we're talking about oh this is at the bottom of my list it still made it onto the list yeah yeah exactly that's true that's still an accolade for the games yeah there are many that didn't yeah yeah we had a decent sized list that we cut down to these nine each of us yeah it's a good point yep yeah so that was my number nine adrian small great if you like roller knights can definitely recommend it yep shall i go with my number eight then all right so my number eight is anno 1800 so this is an economic game by martin wallace no you know what it is this is i think i'm really surprised that it

9:05 would be that low on your list okay and just to interject is that it's funny because when we write the reviews and things or play the games we generally have the same opinion we never it's never that we don't differ very much besides you having some genres you prefer and don't prefer and the same with me like dudes on the map but it's just interesting because i think we generally like oh we really like this game and we we agree on everything but yet when you rank them they're so different yeah and i do really like this game that's why it's it's made to number eight but i think if we'd have made this list when we first got it we got really obsessed with it it would have been higher but i do think the more i played it the spark got lost a little bit for me i don't really know why i can't really put my finger on that and i still i still really like it and i would happily play it any time um but when we first got it it just really was like wow this is so fun and i just maybe lost the spark a bit but totally still enjoy it i really like the snowballing effect of the actions you have in that game so this leads to this leads to this and i find that kind of thing really satisfying it is actually kind of simple as well and all you're doing you're doing the same thing kind of over and over again but like i said it's always progressive and i think that's pretty cool actually because it still feels interesting even though you're kind of doing the same actions technically there is a lot of player interaction there which i think is quite unique for that kind of euro game maybe i guess not

10:36 that unique anymore but as a little something it's not just a dry sort of economic euro because of the player interactions you can trade with other um i like also that the trading the other players don't have a choice if you trade with them so there's player interaction but it's not negative in any way i think the worst thing someone can do to you is maybe take a tile that you were going for but they never you never get blocked out of anything so i think that's actually quite nice that there's interaction but it's not overwhelmingly negative and we said it in our review but just enjoy the humor of that game it's probably not supposed to be funny in the slightest but we do find humor in it that you know you say hey anyone want to trade a trade token for a sausage or who's got the best sausage factory and we kind of make our own humor with that i guess so um yeah we dig up a lot at this dry economic game which is which is kind of funny but yeah like i said i think it just slipped down the list i think maybe we just for me overplayed it uh we really played it a lot when we first got it and um yeah maybe that just diminished the spark a bit all right yeah yeah so my number eight is i think this might surprise you yeah but it's summoner wars second edition okay yeah yeah so this is a and i think to be fair we were both

12:08 surprised by how much we liked it i think because i was a bit iffy but i mainly got it because a lot of high-profile reviewers had given really good reviews of it so i thought well i'll try it and then i really took to it and it's essentially a card based kind of head-to-head chest light game where you you play summoners and their armies and this is represented by deck and you kind of play the cards onto a chest-like board and you move them around and you attack there's very simplistic rules so this is one of the good things i like the rules are very simplistic but because each deck is unique in the kind of powers on the soldiers and the event cards that come with it and the way the summers work it feels really diverse from sumner to summoner and i think you come with it comes with six different decks of sumner summoners and their armies whatever and factions factions that's probably bad and it just each one feels completely unique and plays with in a totally different way and then on top of that uh because you have all these different cards many of them are repeated but you know there's still quite a variety depending how they come out during the game in the order you can actually have different strategies with the same faction game to game if you replay them i think that's there's even more like variety for your money so i just think it's a really good head-to-head game it reminds us stuff like undaunted very tense

13:40 but the reason it's only number eight is because it has a few issues i think number one would be that and this might be a personal thing so don't take it from us but the box says 30 minutes to 60 minutes for a game i don't think we've ever had a game even anywhere close to that unless a player has messed up and they've been blitzed by the other player within 20 minutes but otherwise it's you know like 90 minutes and that two hours yeah and it's a bit too long for what that game is and again it could just be us maybe it would get too good and the second issue why it's not higher is i tend to find that a lot of the time you'll end up having basically one player is almost certainly lost but because the game doesn't end till their summoner's killed it goes on for 20 minutes too long as you chase their somewhere around and they have a lot of health and you have to keep hitting them and if they swan someone in the way and it goes on and it's kind of like futile playing yeah and so that's the other negative i think which one keeps it on check in yeah yes so yeah that was the summoner wars second edition yeah do you have anything to add not at the moment all right move to number seven then so my number seven is tina's trail another that doesn't surprise doesn't surprise you okay it's another martin wallace

15:11 game so my number eight and number seven are both uh martin wallace this is a bit of a lighter economic game set in cornwall in there when there was a mining boom in cornwall and they were mining copper and tin um you basically bid on some mines and you find out how much metal is in that mine once you've bid i mean there are some mechanisms so you can sneakily check but essentially but there's also water in the mine and the more water there is the more it costs you to extract that metal bad bad water and there's just different actions you can do to extract the water and make it easier for you to get your metal out and what's really cool is that the metal prices fluctuate round to round so it's a bit of a gamble there so i think what i mostly like about this game is i enjoy games that are set in real historical sort of geographical locations that set in cornwall drink no no fancy trite for you i just like to learn things and i just if i can do that from board games and that's just an extra plus always thinking about the pub quiz that we do every week so if i can learn maybe it will come up in the pub quiz one time what was the main metal they were mining in cornwall and then i would know it was tin and maybe copper anyway i just love travel and even though it's set in a historical time i just like things that are based on a real place again i think this is a the mechanisms in it so the bidding and the fluctuating metal price is a

16:42 really interesting way to shake up something that again could be a bit of a dry economic game i think the fact that you decide each round whether you want to spend your money on buying points or save your money to buy uh more mines or perhaps save yourself some money because sometimes it can cost money to extract the metal i think that's really interesting as well it's just a nice little game um it's a really good price what you get in the box and yeah i guess it's not higher because again we said in our review i mean it's a really good game just not the best game in the world and maybe after dozens and dozens of plays you might get a little bit tired of it because even after some games i mean we've played quite a lot so far but there's nothing to really explore game to game the the variability comes from like bidding with the other players and then what happens there and how much metals so it's like if you just juxtapose with sumner wars where you have these different decks you have you know different cards coming out different times each time you play with those same decks whereas here you don't have that it's just randomization of the minds and you know the game plays exactly you're doing the same things just in a remixed order yeah a lot of it comes from the player interaction which is great but obviously if the game's the same every time eventually that interaction yeah yeah i guess it depends who you're playing with but we were playing a lot with our

18:12 friend vahab who kept tanking the auctions basically didn't he and he kept doing that strategy like game to game and to be fair it did work for him i think the first one one or two times and then there's that just didn't so hopefully he'll just stop doing the same sort of thing every time uh yeah he basically was just it's because we're too competitive so he would start an auction not even wanting that mind that he knew me and pharaoh would try to outbid him or outbid each other cause us to spend all of our money so then he would just get a mine for one pound because none of us had any money left yeah but yeah okay what's your number seven so well what i would just want to say before we get to that is that if we were doing honorable mentions tina's trail would be mine as it did make it to my list okay but it would be the honorable mention i think one of the main reasons it didn't is like you saying i think the i think it's a combination that it's a reprint and i didn't want to chunk up my list with a lot of reprints and second editions and i think another thing is like you say it's a fun game but you know that it's just that long journey it's like a nice game but i don't think it's special either it shows his age i guess uh but i did really enjoy it so i'll be my honorable mention fair so number seven i think this this might surprise you actually okay uh and i will

19:43 say this is the most risky one i've put on my list because it's the one i feel like with a few more plays i might just turn around and go i actually don't like it or it's boring or something interesting but it's also the one that stays in my mind and no matter how long it's been since we last played it i want to get it out again and give it more goes and that is intrepid okay yeah no now so yeah number seven is intrepid and this is the one i might spend the most time explaining just because i think it'd be the one that people are least aware of yeah so was the kickstart in 2020 that backed this year i think in the summer and the concept is it's a cooperative dice management game where you're all astronauts aboard the international space station in the midst of a disaster so i think the movie gravity maybe there's a toxic leak maybe uh your the station's being hit with debris and you have to kind of survive so the gimmick is that each astronaut they're all unique and they're represented by different nationalities and each nationality uh has its own way of manipulating the dice so you have your own private puzzle you could say i think as an example russia is about re-rolling the dice to get very specific dice but you get to re-roll a lot and then you have to put these uh specific numbers on tiles you know uh for the space station these generate resources and then who do we players who like

21:13 players last canada they had a thing where they rolled a lot of dice but any odd ones got put into storage and you couldn't use and it was about manipulating the dice in your storage or getting them out of storage with specific numbers or evens or you know so these all played differently and i think it's just a generally interesting puzzle uh so why it's on here as i think it's quite unique yeah uh it stays on my mind and i always want to go back to it we haven't played it so much which is why i think it could change but we've had it a long time so it's not like cult of the new it's played on my mind all that time and i just really like i'm not super big on cooperative games necessarily but it does it perfectly for me which is where you kind of do your own puzzle and there's minimal ways you can help each other you can send each other a die or something but that's about it yeah and you communicate and you're like okay well if i add this tile to my side of the station you know you're gonna have to make more oxygen next time so you know you're like can you do that and you kind of communicate about what you need and you win by completing missions which is producing more and more and more of certain resources or doing something yeah and i just so i like that you can't quarterback you get your own puzzle but you still collaborate i like the manipulation i think it's really interesting how each astronaut has this really different manner of working a different puzzle

22:43 and i think the components i mean it's bit of a mixed bag some of the components are really nice and others are not so nice and i think it was a thing that when it backed there was like damage to a lot of the components and they had issues ours is mostly okay or there are a few things you can see glue marks because it unaligned yeah player mats and stuff but i think the dice are really hefty and nice and it's just a really interesting game that it stays on my mind and i want to go back and try a different astronaut try a different scenario so yeah so that was my number seven intrepid um yeah that's that's fair yeah uh i'm not gonna say honorable mention because it didn't make it to my list but yeah i do think it's really interesting i think i just didn't put it on because we hadn't played it enough i think i really like it but i don't know if i've formed a full opinion of it but i would agree with you yeah that we're more competitive so we you know not massively into co-op games there are some we like but agree that i like kind of doing my own puzzle although you shouted at me once because i did my puzzle wrong she didn't do a puzzle wrong she did basic edition maybe i do need help yeah it's hard she we had to generate electricity and i was like we need 16.

24:02 she's like yeah i can do that no problem and then she did it and she only generated like 10. and then and then we instantly went into the red zone and everyone died yeah oh well okay should we move on to number six yeah so my number six is someone who was no are you kidding no really it's really fun i never would have thought it would be that high i enjoyed that reaction to quote you i am shooketh yeah maybe it's just the fact that i looked at it when you got it and thought that it just wasn't going to be my thing so maybe i'm over ranking it because i was so surprised by it if that makes sense um maybe if i wasn't going to be surprised by it it might have ended up lower in the list maybe that's i don't know i just had to rank on and gut and that's where that's where it sat and yeah like i said i was really surprised by it the cover and the art and everything and i shouldn't really judge things by their cover but it just looked like it wasn't going to be my type of thing and then we played it and had a great time and you would explain the game but um just think it's really fun well so fun it's quite stressful but it's really tense battle and that takes i guess a concept that is kind of chess like and then has these layers on where you have

25:33 these different summoners and factions and i just think it's cool yeah just i think i was just surprised by how much i liked him yep so yeah yeah good girl that's your number six yeah yeah okay so my number six hello sansan is why don't you come up here and show everyone nah he's happy down there are you happy down there my number six is comment blood and sand and this was uh yeah kickstarter is i guess not reimagining but an updated version of comet and we've never played comet before uh and i think so from the start what i liked about it is you're not necessarily so big with dudes on the map games and what boosted my enjoyment of this is that you quite liked it yeah so then it wasn't like this thing where i felt guilty that was like no i never feel guilty you know what i mean it's just never fun when you're playing something someone's obviously not enjoying it yeah so you enjoyed it and i mean i just there's just a lot to like about it for me i'm not one for miniatures per se but i think it has really cool miniatures and i think they actually kind of do something which is quite nice i like all the crazy powers you can get because you can you know you can upgrade powers you get these game breaking powers and it's just really cool and because they're all unique different people go different ways so there's a

27:04 lot of replayability there and you even have different types of power so depending how many you're playing with you can rotate some in and out to keep it fresh uh so you can do a lot of kind of you know sideways movement weird little things and i like the battle system i think it's really clever where you secretly play a card yeah and what i really like is that you have the second level of the battle card where there's a difference between winning a battle and killing the opponent's troops and i like that sometimes if you play it right your opponent can win the battle but then they have no one left so they don't get to take over the territory they're fighting for i just find it really interesting i like that there's a lot of like weird movement with the teleporting like um i just think it's a really good fun swashbuckling game you know what i mean like yeah just really vibrant and actiony and it never gets bogged down too much with with battles and it's just kind of almost beer and pretzels type dudes on a map game but you do need a bit more strategy than that yeah but i think so it was just a nice surprise for me and i just really enjoyed that yeah i think we haven't played it in a long time but i do really enjoy it yeah yeah i also like it like you said dudes and i'm out not typically my thing but i think there's a lot more going on than that there's other actions you can do in other words to get points i mean you have to battle at some point otherwise you're probably not going to win but it's not only yeah that's where you

28:36 like that you can get it other ways as well and like you said i think um i don't like dudes on a map games where it's a lot of effort to build up your army or whatever and then you can risk going into battle get everything wiped out because you're trying to play the game and then sort of be punished for that and you have to really slowly work work your way back up whereas i think comet is easy enough to just recruit soldiers again yeah so it doesn't bother me that much so yeah good choice all right so my number five is hadrian's wall makes sense yeah he didn't you weren't as shocked by that one that was a i'm not surprised to see it reaction yeah i guess it's higher up the list for me than you because i totally agree with the things that you said that were maybe a bit negative about it but maybe they're more negative for you than they are for me and i think it just despite those things fills a nice gap in our collection because like you said it is more complex flip and right has a nice play time but it's not a filler game so i think it just fills a nice space in our collection and i always enjoy playing i don't think there's ever a time where you'd say i should get hadrian's wool out and i wouldn't be feeling it i think i'd always just be really up for it so i think that's why it's a bit higher up my list than you um i feel like i do tend to follow the same routes all

30:07 the time whereas i know that you've made more of an effort than me to try all of the different things whereas i have some of them suck yeah um but i mean that's okay that's okay for me i think i do kind of like games i kind of realized when i was thinking about my list where you sort of have to optimize with what you have already and that obviously fits that might tie in with the game you're going to come out with leia i'm sure might it optimizing your turns maybe yeah i don't know we'll come back for that we'll come back to it i'm sure it's coming um yes i mean you can both players sort of sort of start each round with the same resources you might get a few different ones because of your personal cards but ultimately you have the same thing i just think it's interesting that you know one player might go from one direction or another with with the same thing and you just really gotta optimize with what you have i i just find it satisfying yeah okay yeah yeah this is a good game to be fair it's one of the best flip and write roland knights i've played yeah i think sorry just to just to say as well i think we are new with the unright genre this year and the first two we got i wouldn't say welcome to new las vegas it's not light at all it's actually quite complex i think for what i thought rolling right was but

31:38 i just thought they were all very light games and then obviously hadrian's ball is not so i think it just opened my mind to the fact that yeah not all and rights have to be sort of like filler games okay yeah right so my number five is sleeping gods oh yeah no it's not that i'm not a fan just don't like story driven games yeah i did enjoy it but yeah well you say well you like it i know i just not oh yeah i kind of forgot about it but then i'm just like oh yeah of course that's on your list so sleeping gods is uh yeah a story driven cooperative game uh but of course you can just play it solo because it's story driven and essentially it's it's just yeah you're you're the crew of a ship who has been kind of sucked into this alternate world maybe you know some mystical stuff going on and you're just given this task to weigh the gods and you have to find totems and it's almost uh choose your own adventure book where you have a big map and you decide where to move and you interact with icons on this map and then you read story passages then you choose what to do and you know depending what you choose you get different outcomes you get story and the reason i like it is it's really well written i think it's really interesting it's really fun and what it does is it just does everything right that one of these games should do because a

33:09 lot of these games don't do those things right it's just one example is if you you fail a challenge you might take a lot of damage and status effects and it might be very bad but generally you're not blocked off from getting story beats or continuing the story even whereas in other games you might spend a bunch of resources and fail and then you know you get a broken leg or something but you don't get to progress you still have to try and do it again but now from a worse position and i just don't find that fun in any way and the designer realized the main point is the story that's always the focus i like that when you do challenges which obviously you do a lot you can almost always succeed if you really want to and that's the one you want to succeed on because you can spend all this stuff and add cards and bring in you know companions and all this and you can almost certainly win it but it might make it harder for you to do the next challenge that's important so it's like this balance but you never feel cheated that you just couldn't do it and now you know you you've ruined your playthrough because it wasn't possible yeah and then finally the last thing i'll mention is i really like the fluidity of it which i think was one of your favorite parts as well where it's not silly like some other games are where you can only do this at this exact time it treats it like real life where if you were a crew of a ship you know you'd be

34:41 helping in you'd be running grabbing something you'd be doing this so other players can help you and it's kind of like all you do is you commit the characters you want to add to a challenge then you flip a card you add up kind of the numbers you have then if you're a bit low you can use command tokens to add in other stuff you can discard cards so it's just really fluid and other players can help at that point so it's a really nice balance of you know it's not like oh well there's nothing we can do now yeah keeps it really engaging because you participate yeah i think you said in the review that sometimes you forget it's even whose hand it is because you're still so involved yeah and then i've been playing it solo recently uh the last couple weeks and i've really been enjoying it and one thing i've really enjoyed is i just went in a different direction than we did before and pretty much everything i've experienced over two or three playthroughs so far uh in this campaign has been completely unique so there's obviously a lot of content there as well yeah so yeah so that would be my number five well yeah okay now we're getting the second second half yeah the crux should we take a little break and come back all right let's do that

36:08 so we're back and ready to do it all over again yeah farrell's got another beer so he's ready for the the top four now why don't you have another beer i haven't finished the first one yeah there's one there later don't worry all right so number four okay so my number four is cascadia oh so cascadia is a tile laying game and we're basically putting different sorts of animals and different sorts of terrain tiles and there's a number of objectives objectives that you have to hit and this is at my number four i think the ease of getting it to the table has a lot to do with it i really like the theme again set in a kind of real place even though the actual tiles and the animal tokens have nothing to do with it it's really just the name of the game and the the box art uh it could really be anywhere once you start playing but yeah it's anything to do with nature i really like it's just a very soothing relaxing game easy to teach but deep enough that it keeps the likes of us who usually like more medium to heavyweight games i think it's an all-around generally pleasant game there's only really two things that you're thinking about so where to place your animals best to hit the objectives there's also sort of another type of scoring where the person with the longest mountain range or

37:39 grasslands or whatever gets some points but every time you take a tile and toe animal token combo you really do have to kind of sit and analyze okay where is best of places to hit both of those objectives in the best way possible so again i do feel like this for me hits that thing i like of having to optimize with what you have because each round there's only a choice of four tile and token combinations so you have to you have to kind of work with what you've got there's a little mechanism to change things up sometimes but you for the most part have a choice of four things and yeah i like that yeah yeah yeah all right thanks no comment no no no pretty nothing saying no pretty standard

38:37 um so yeah so my number four is are you ready for this one yeah kanban eevee oh okay so yeah my number four is kanban evie and this is i guess an upgraded version of one of the towels soda's old games kanban uh this time in collaboration with eagle riff and games so you got one it's like the rest of his games really now you've got the big box high quality production very expensive very importantly you know tool and you know it's got big deep rich gameplay and in this you're trying to optimize uh so you're working in an electronic car manufacturing facility and you're trying to optimize your tents basically to impress your boss sandra so i mean there's a few things i like and we at heart we're definitely leaning towards more heavy complex games and this hits that note just fine i like it in terms that it's actually a bit more direct than vitella said as other games even though it's still you know you can do things kind of in any order and you can go here you can go there and it's not set you don't you know it's not actually a great western trail where you have to move around a path in that order you can kind of go anywhere but

40:08 you know you need to get car parts and car designs to then get cars and upgrade cars yeah yeah there's a very logical order there that you can kind of go towards and then you loop back and forth you loop round i like i really like the sandra mechanic where the mean sandra i guess huge steaks there's a nice one variant in the the new version and this is where she goes to each work station and you have these little tracks that you kind of spend turns moving up and it's training training yeah that's the way i was looking for i was gonna say studying so you train on these tracks and she goes to somewhere and she looks at the player who was trained the least then she evaluates her work and she has a kind of cutoff point do you have three card designs if you don't and you're the players trained least in the design department then you're getting punished by losing a bunch of points and it's just a really great mechanic because you can almost use her offensively against other players if you go to a department just before she gets there and move up the track then they lose a bunch of points they didn't think they would yeah it just adds a bit of spice to this game and i think it's such a cool and interesting mechanic because we tried it with nice sandra once just for our review and we just found it really to make the game really kind of plain and boring yeah it really took some of the fun out of the game i think not having but also as we said we're very competitive and we're savages so we love to see each other get negative points so yeah so that's kanban ev

41:40 uh and it's just something i i really enjoyed it that's why it's number four but it wasn't my all-time favorite of the year obviously interesting okay so top three now oh my goodness so my number three was orleans oh really i'm trying to think now because i almost said i know what your number one is and now i don't know what your number two is yeah i think i think my number two will be interesting to you but um really i'm trying to well i won't think so just take that time and i'll look like i'll look for the whole thing so you just tell them about it yeah so correct me if i'm wrong you know more on the details than this but um it was republished this year by capstone games right yeah yeah i think it's an older game but well i will say this is probably the most cheeky one on the list because capstone got the rights to reprint it i think yeah everywhere so we we got it because we generally any game from capstone games has always been a hit with us and we really trust the games they put out yeah so i think every time we've seen it in you know the board game geek i think it's in the top 30 or something maybe and every time we've seen it our eyes just glazed over and we're like oh beige euro like they've just ignored it so i don't care

43:12 but then when capstone said they're going to reprint it we're like okay well we're a little interested now so we got it and yeah so that's why it's on this list but technically i think out of many reprints like tina's trail it's probably i think the least jazzing up they've done to it so it's a bit of a cheeky one but yeah i think we we really loved it so that's why we're kind of making the exception yeah like you said or alluded to it is a sort of beige trader uh game and you're going up some tracks a classic euro really going up control contracts literally getting some monks to work with you getting some farmers to work with you in ye oldie uh yogi times in france um but what i think is really interesting again is just the mechanic where how you get your workers is really shaking it up and without that obviously it would be pretty dry but essentially you usually get workers every round and you put them in a bag much like quacks of quedlinberg and then every round that is almost certainly 60 of the reason it's your number three because it's like quite squiddling bag true and i couldn't put that yeah for the best games of 2021. yeah i do enjoy pulling things out of that black cloth bag so you pull the workers out and you only get a certain amount which you can increase but let's say it's six and you place your workers on these

44:43 different actions so to go to the next city in a wagon might require i don't know coming back to my head but a boatman a farmer and a knight let's just say but once you've pulled them out of your bag you just have those to work with so again i think it just ties into that whole optimizing with what you have thing for me and it's just so satisfying when you pull out six seven eight however many workers and you can just slot them in all nicely and then get three actions out of it because sometimes you might have like a leftover worker that you can't use that round you can still place it but you obviously can't do the action for that round you just have to leave it when they all fit in nicely just find that really satisfying and again we um played it once the first time didn't we and then i think played it about three times in a row we left it out on the table because we knew that we were gonna um play it again and i i just like it i just think it's really fun and um yeah it's a cool game a little bit of player interaction in terms of where you go on the map but very small amount the only thing that is horrendous about orleans is the setup so it could never be number one yeah i agree with that 100 all right all right i'll see you on number three i'm getting excited now do you want do you have a guess no okay oath nine okay it is orleans ah

46:16 nice it's a bit annoying because i think you just read from my my script and said everything i wanted to say i just wrote mine before filming it and what i wanted literally the last sentence is the same as my last sentence about the set the thing that keeps this from being an even more top-tier game is the setup it's so horrendous compared to what you get i think we said it might be the first game that we buy a custom insert for just to get it to the table more yeah because it is that's prevented whoever decided that you should randomize all of the tokens and then put them all back in order again yeah that's the evil part so yeah i mean i like it for a lot of the same reasons as you i think it has a really great twist on the classic euro mechanic with this bag building uh i really i really like the ways that you can not well i guess negate luck but the fact that if you get someone who's not used to useful to you that turn you can put them on their action space or sorry you can put them on an action space you want them to be on and then they stay there throughout the round in fact you can even fill up an action space so it's ready to go and then not do it that time and do it the next turn i just think that's really clever yeah i really like that mechanic that you can okay well i can't do much with this bike

47:47 and put him over there kind of thing something's wasted yeah and i think it's fun to draw out the bag as you went over and what i like is that a lot of the times you gain new workers uh and basically most of the game is gaining new workers and somewhere moving up tracks very euro but what i like is often you get a reward or a little thing for taking whoever you take yeah that's true so you always get rewarded i think the fishermen give you money because i guess they're selling fish you get um the the builder the uh whoever the brown guys the coffin carpenter or whatever he gives you this wagon wheel that you can use to block off spaces so now that action's cheaper um there's an investor maybe i can't remember what it is yeah where he gives you a new tile that has action spaces on that gives you like some edge maybe you'll produce a wine every time you fill it so i i just really like that as well you get this these little endorphin bursts yeah so orleans was my number three i think i didn't expect anything and like i said i only got it because capstone re-printed it and i can see why it's in the top 30 or whatever because it is excellent yeah it's very good that would be if you that'll be like one of the best all-time games i've played i think yeah just like as a classic legacy kind of game yeah maybe it doesn't hold up so well now with bells and whistles but sometimes you do you need something a bit classic and solid right okay so my number two

49:19 is oh go and guess no i'm not going to guess coffee traders oh yeah do you know what now that you say it i'm not surprised i should have known that actually yeah i just couldn't think of all the games on the pre-list so coffee traders has the worst rule book of all time i don't read the rules so that's why i at my number two uh cause this doesn't affect me too much um is a big box heavy complex almost vital asurder like game i would say lots of interlinking mechanisms and cascading effects and by capstone and it is about making fair trade coffee and in all the different regions with coffee regions around the world i have to say i struggle a little bit to put my finger on and articulate exactly why i love it so much but i try my best sometimes it's just you like what you like but i think the theme has a lot to do with it actually again it's based on you know real life coffee regions and i just think that's really cool so it's like ethiopia or brazil or sumatra i just like that i like geography um it looks amazing all set out on the table i think it's really easy yeah table presents is fantastic the components even though some of them

50:52 are a little bit damaged or have a little dents in them or whatever oh yeah overall yeah arrived a bit some of them yeah some of them have chunks poor donkeys have done yeah little donkeys that's a bit sad but generally like it just looks amazing yes it does i have to agree though um just i just think it's so interesting i'm not very good at it because i'm famously not good at euro games but i just like how you go through these phases so you you have three years and in each year you have um three yeah three years and then i think it's six phases in each year so in this year you sorry in this phase you um put plantations down or you have different actions that you can do on the board on the different regions where you might be sort of um building the plantations but you you're not uh completely in control of the regions because obviously the whole theme is about fair trade and being cooperative so even though there's a little bit of area control points at the end of the game it's more about how you can make it better for the farmers so actually like monopolies are not good yeah you're not supposed to monopolize the regions i think yeah it's i think it's just a really interesting mechanic that you do get points for area control but it's kind of i guess in the meta points for helping the coffee traders

52:23 grow or the coffee farmers i've seen a lot of traders like grow their fields and what they can do because it's just a really interesting twist that and it's something that's i think hard to explain to people their first play yeah is that they're like oh well you know i've got all these plantations so i get like seven coffee and you're like no you don't get any coffee unless you buy it yeah it's really hard to wrap your head around because it seems counter intuitive for like a competitive board game and maybe that's why i like it it like subverts your expectations a little bit and there's just so much you can do different routes you can go down obviously we don't get it to the table all the time because as you do the setup and the rules are um challenging um and it is a big heavy game but yeah i just i just really like it yeah to be fair i think i don't think it's heavy enough that it'll prevent me from getting it to the table like maybe a hotel or certain one would but i would say that is the setup is a big part like i don't think it's a game whatever surf on my own anymore it's just tough yeah uh but yeah there's just different ways that you can score points so in our first game our friend who we thought was really playing quite incorrectly who was selling a lot of coffee to the coffee bars around the world which we weren't really focusing on so much he actually

53:55 ended up winning the game so yeah i just think that's that's fun it's um different routes and again you really have to optimize your turns it's very tight actually um so you just have to really make the most of everything that you're doing so yeah i think that's fair i'm not surprised actually i just forgot because it's yeah i just forgot that uh it's not on my list i'll ruin so i just forgot i think i do agree with everything you said actually i think maybe i like it a lot less because i'm the one that had to go through the setup and the rule book yeah and i think even today there was a post on reddit about uh worst or best rule books and i posted about it because i still get mad thinking about it it's just such an awful rulebook and awful set up instructions it's a shame i think we said in the review that it's a game i would love to see a second edition of just tying up the rulebook yeah essentially but i agree with a lot what you say i don't think it's not like i'd be like oh that game isn't very good i think it's very interesting it's got some good decision spaces i don't think it clicks with me as much as you though but i'd always be happy to play it for sure i think one of the issues we've had i honestly think we would have played it more maybe it would have been higher on my list not that we haven't played a decent amount yeah i think maybe valhalla's not super big

55:25 on it no and then some of our friends who we've played with have moved away so i don't know who now we would get out with yeah just because valhab's not you know what i mean he only played it once so twice was it twice yeah we got him to do it again one night i think he was okay with it i think he'd play if we made him yeah we have to do that just make him play okay so yeah my number two is yeah cascadia ah that is interesting actually yeah so my number two is cascadia and this was actually one that i was really back and forth about being my number one and the reason i think it's not is you described it very well but for me just that it doesn't do anything novel it's very it sounds really mean but unoriginal yeah if you know what like the way it works there's nothing too clever about it so i i felt a little and also i think the other half would be that we like big heavy games so it also wasn't that so i don't get as excited about it as i would a big heavy game but personally for my side i think i think it would deserve to be on a lot of you know best game of the year lists just because it threads the eye of a

56:56 needle so definitely in that as you said it's very easy to get to the table and teach even a non-gamer but it's the way the scoring works and the puzzles are so interesting that means how you play like 13 or 14 times and i still want to keep playing i'm not i've never been bored from it i'm not getting bored i think i can play it dozens of times just because you know you have the different score cards and i think it came with five different scorecards you have five different animals so the combination alone is going to be you know so high of getting different ones and doing different things with them we can just randomize them i guess you're not expecting it to do anything novel each time so we're more than happy that we know what it's going to be like every game we're still happy to play it every time right puzzle the figuring out it's just i just love it because it's also random what you get and there's way to mitigate luck and i think it's just a really brilliant game yeah it's perfect i think it's nice as well that we've played it with my family and they took to it yeah and so it's nice when i think my mom stayed back a couple months ago and went up it was like the only game she asked to play again and we played a couple of times so that's nice if you can get your family on that as well yeah but yeah so that's my number two cascadia i think it's a near perfect game i'd say but just not you know it doesn't have that wild factor yeah i'm i'm not surprised it's so harmless but i'm

58:27 also surprised because it is that lighter yeah you know i just thought all of your top ones would be filled with heavier games but that's good that's uh we're very diverse um all right so besides the fact that we've had loads of games on the same list just different positions yeah that's true yeah but i just mean in our tastes yeah yeah we can go from lighter oh yeah i see what you mean yes yes yes yep so the big the big reveal then and i mean i 100 know what this know what yours is so i'm a bit annoyed because i'm from maybe more when we first decided to do this i 100 knew what was going on then okay dramaal yeah and halley's number one is cambodia yeah it's my favorite as fans of the channel will know we absolutely love scythe and it is our number one game holds a very special place in our heart if that aside kanban evie i mean at the moment is my it's my favorite game of all time again like coffee traders here's bold statement i mean maybe even i didn't know yeah i do i do out for all the games we have it is it is my number one not just of the year but my total number one apart from scythe that's in a special category that's like legacy number one

59:57 yeah exactly yeah again like coffee traders i do find it a little bit difficult to put my finger on why i love it so much probably just ties into a lot of the things i've already said about turn optimization again i find the table presents really amazing it looks great the art is brilliant the components are really nice to hold and i think it's just their production quality is super high and i do love you've already said because you've spoken about it but i agree with the sandra mechanic and the way she knocks down points it can be really frustrating but it just shakes the game up because it could otherwise just be you know i don't think i would ever call it just a standard worker placement game because it obviously has a lot more going on than that is a fertile laser game more sort of interlocking mechanisms but i think that really does elevate it super brutal but also very new very unique and gives you just that extra something to to think about when you're playing so yeah again i'm not that good at it but i have one a few times maybe that's why it is also number one it's probably one of the only um like vitella service that i can win sometimes we have a month maybe two or three months back where we played it a few times again after getting out for a while and yeah i think you lost both games and you're really depressed yes it's my favorite

1:01:27 yeah i still want to play it yeah i play it now love it it's so good i will say that i think it's a testament to how much maybe you like it but also both plus it's quite high on my list that it's obviously this big heavy vitella soda game but i think it just missed we recently did a video on our top 10 most played games and it just missed that and i think one of the things we found interesting in that video was ease of getting something to the table almost always trumped how much we love a game and kanban was just off that list which actually is quite impressive considering you know how much effort it takes you could say do you play it yeah and we've only had it in january and the record's been going for much longer than that yeah that is really true yeah yep okay so final number one we didn't clink well that's a really clean closet there we go this is very danish okay so my number one do you have any ideas i actually don't think so no okay well i guess it will surprise you but my number one after consideration is i know 1800 oh of course that's your number one yeah oh my god okay yeah i just think i think it won out wow because

1:02:58 i love a big heavy euro as you said i think we've just it might be a personal opinion that we've had a lot of laughs playing this game like the first couple times we've played it it's just so funny to us to argue about who's canned meat factory was best and i love that at each play account you have a different puzzle because that too everyone can get the industries they need so you don't really need to trade that much uh whereas if you go up to four you know you're have a one in two chance of not being able to get the industry you want so you're going to have to work on trading a lot more and you know it varies with three players that's true um so that's something i really enjoy i just as you said i enjoy that despite doing the same thing the progression yeah just because there's a thing in games that is so difficult to do where you know it's like keeping that uh carrot in front of you to keep you moving and it's very easily happens where it becomes very boring they don't nail it and then you're just doing the same thing you're not progressing much in life's kind of repetitive but i know absolutely nails it where even though you typically are just getting better industries you're just building the same tiles the actions are the same because they're tougher to do and they're harder to do and you know you you just feel progression all the time and they just

1:04:29 really stick that landing i think yeah absolutely true yeah and i think yeah just i wouldn't say i you know i think it's just something i personally liked this year i had a lot of good times with it and i just found it really funny we have a lot of fun meta with it yeah and we just love we love coming up with backstories for the people yeah and we love calling the i think it's cotton toilet paper because it looks like toilet paper yeah this lady needs a lot of beer and toilet paper just like stuff like that yeah so yeah i know 1800 was my my number one i think it's a really sharp design and i look forward to the expansion actually yeah i think i think as well one of the things is that we had criticisms in our review but they were i think in retrospect fairly minor we just felt that maybe it felt like it went on a bit too long yeah just because the game you tend to pick up a lot of cards and then you have to get through them and sometimes you can get to what you said middle of the game or maybe even the the kind of last third of the game and go oh i've got all these cars how long is it going to be and then it just ends yeah but you know i i don't i never regret the time playing no afterwards if you know what i mean i think it ends when it needs to is what's important hmm yeah it was very interesting so i think we should say that so what we're going

1:06:00 to do now is i think we should discuss some big games we left off the list yeah i have two in mind and then which people might be like you're crazy and then we'll also do some shout outs to games that we really that we experienced for the first time this year and really enjoyed but they're not from this year and those we're not going to go through them in depth but we're just going to shout them out yep in case you want to know the games that we discovered that we really love this year that can pull on this list so obviously i think too that people might have expected would be oaf yeah and maybe unfathomable okay yeah which i think we we didn't put on because and so unfathomable would never be in my mm-hmm list three factors it's all right you've played it less than me i did play it less than you you know i did consider putting oath at the bottom of the list because it's just so interesting isn't it and in our review you know we did say takes a lot of plays to get into at least in our experience we found it tough and i don't know real fluctuating relationship with it then that in itself is kind of interesting yeah and even after 10 plays i'd get really frustrated with it but it does kind of just leave you wanting a little bit more and just because of that i did think i made i was considering to put maybe another nine or

1:07:31 so that is interesting yeah i'll say i never considered oath but it's only because a big issue we had is that you need a dedicated group to play and we didn't have that we did play it a lot before we did our review uh and one of our main gaming buddies he played it almost every time with us and in the end he got so frustrated with it that he like still refuses to play it which is a big thing of why we can't play it anymore um so we've just struggled to find people and i think that is actually quite a good reason to not have it on the list of our favorite games because if you can't get it to the table what's the point of it no matter how good it is and it's not even that we i mean we have certain people that have played it and don't want to play it anymore but i can't even imagine being bothered to try and get someone into it do you know what i mean it's such a barrier i'm like oh yeah i don't really want to explain it i don't want to have to go through the first few games with them where i mean it's not that fun in the first few games you don't really know sometimes it's not that funny the second five games yeah so yeah that is a barrier isn't it yeah yeah but you're right it's very interesting and i honestly probably would like to get a group where i could play it maybe once a month or something and keep trying it because i mean we love root we love pax premier i think there's interesting mechanisms i think i love the cards the art the design yeah it is just again if you can't get it to the table then it's not how's it going to be a good game yeah

1:09:02 so unfathomable i think is likely to be maybe it wouldn't be on people's i think it probably would sharpen a few people's best games of the year because it's long awaited uh there's a lot of hype around it we have a review of it but we just kind of found that because they've adapted into the arkham universe it was too random so the problem is it almost treated the whole concept like an arkham game where everything that happens is bad so then if you're the humans it's it's not like there's only one well depending how many players you have but it's not like usually there's only one traitor it's usually quite even on how many traitors and um humans there are and because every round the the kind of mythos cards are bad for the humans kind of either way sometimes i find that it makes the edge lean towards the traitors and i guess that much harder it's a lot more fun i think when the cultist is in the game because then you have another player invested in getting to boston but yeah just i i think the problem was the randomness and that you could have really incredibly tense games of deception and fun and then you could also have games that is practically over within the first 20 minutes and it's obvious who's gonna win or you can have games where it's in the middle but will happen is with the first hour you move six spaces towards boston

1:10:34 second hour you move two and then the game it just i think by far my biggest criticism the thing that keeps off the list would be the length by no means needs to be as long as they made it yeah because it just the gameplay doesn't evolve yeah that much to to need that gameplay time fair yep so that's why if i don't know you expect those two to be on there that's why they're not i think but i think yeah i think oath would probably be on a lot of people's lists if they'd been playing it okay so then we'll move on to just the final shout outs so maybe we should get the dogs in for this i think i have some treats swenson do you want some chicken treat come on come on come on nice asleep though in camera she won't hit her she's a bit deaf now maggie

1:11:36 come on you want to come up for it good girl yeah there we go all right so i think your number one challenge would be craig's acquittal max for your favorite game you discovered this year yeah absolutely love quacks love the love the bag they push the luck it's just i just find it really fun i think in part it's because i can beat farrell at it which is a rare occurrence for a game because you're too much of a game you've won the last three games in all right yeah i just think it's really novel and unique and and just like a bit of fun right is how i feel about quacks how about you yeah i mean i i really enjoy i wouldn't have played it 22 times or whatever we played it if uh if it wasn't i didn't like it but yeah it's a game that i say every single time we play this is a stupid game yes we're sure so i've mixed feelings but i do love it so i think also i'll just run through them i think undaunted would be one that really took us by surprise yeah and we we really enjoyed um so i think one whilst we've played a lot this year i think definitely undaunted that that really took us by surprise and we loved the deck building and the how tense it was and we had these two hour battles yeah if am we've played a lot didn't we oh yeah fine fine we've played a lot that's true that's quite an interesting game

1:13:08 yeah just trying to think oh what do we have over there we need to consult the cupboard yes that is always important oh god this is a problem you play so many games right and then it's like i really liked uh prager actually oh yeah prague was a really good one yeah i think hanzo tonic was good oh yeah one for getting people to play yeah um i guess we have to give a little shout out to the quest for el dorado oh yeah i'm sorry though i meant to do that so the quest for el dorado has been we got it about a month ago and it's literally in we did a video two weeks ago of our top 10 most played games and el dorado is already in that list now after having a month yeah because the the families love it i think i've honestly played it that's been like eight times for my mum probably yeah it was a lot of el torado yeah no but i mean overall because we played it the first time we played it we played it with her yeah and then we played it six times over the weekend when she was visiting so el dorado has been a real um end of end of year one i guess i'd like to give a shout out to you all of the rolling rights that we've got or the ones that you've got first i suppose i was going to say i think that's at earmarks railroad inc as a shout out exactly that was on most played and that's the first one we got i think maybe for sure yeah a lot of good games this year yeah so i think

1:14:40 you can't go wrong obviously with any of these games they're all all really good and unique and fun and interesting it's been a good year we've played a lot of games very tired tired of board games no not really i want to play one after this yeah i was just thinking that maybe on mars something heavy and for town certainly okay um but yeah so that that was our top ten nine i think i had a lot of well we can add one now nine jacket top nine and i had a lot of fun filming it yep the most important thing is that we hope it helps you uh if you were well maybe you're just interested in what they were but also if you're trying to decide what to get for yourself or someone else we hope it was helpful treat yourself so end of the year treat yourself treat yourself either way uh we hope it's interesting would love you to comment what you think of our choices and who's is the most right no yeah and if you enjoyed this or is helpful please like and subscribe mainly subscribe because that's very important to us and if you subscribe we'll give the dogs some treats they already get a lot yeah you get a lot of treats you just saw them get treats but most importantly thank you for watching and we hope you enjoyed it and happy holidays lol