Top 6 Games

What are your favourite games? – It’s probably the most common question to ask anyone that is into board games. So every year I do a Top 6 Games list, and here you’ll find the one for 2017:

Imperial Settlers

This game has everything for me. Great art, awesome mechanics, and multiple unique factions. It’s a game that evolves along with your understanding of it. It’s simple to teach and easy to play, but the more you play it and the more you get to know the strength and weakness of the different factions, the better you’ll become at it. The multi-function cards and the big difference in how the factions play, are some of my favourite things about Imperial Settlers. It also has enough expansions now to make “deck building” a real possibility, and works great as a solo challenge. You can check out my full review of the game here: Review: Imperial Settlers

Roll for the Galaxy

I admit it, I like Race for the Galaxy, but it has some problems (main ones being that it has so many weird symbols you need to know the meaning of, and so many cards you have to read each turn). Roll for the Galaxy fixes all of these problems and adds a fantastic dice system (and loads of custom dice). The game is different each time you play it, and while planets, technologies, and the roll of the dice will make you more efficient at some aspects of the game you never feel “forced” to do something and you can’t be hurt by “bad rolls”. I can’t get enough of this game, and the expansion adds even more.

Clank!

I’m actually a big fan of the deck building mechanism. I like the classic Dominion well enough, though it feels a bit themeless and soulless to me. Marvel Legendary on the other hand has too many weird moving parts for me. Clank! strikes a perfect balance for me. It’s very thematic and yet, simple. It has more than just pure deck-building going on with the movement of your thief on the board, yet it doesn’t become overly complex. For me this is the best deck builder out there and it’s a game I always have so much fun playing. It even works great as a 2, 3 and 4 player game.

Alien Frontiers

Rolling dice is great, but rolling dice and then placing them as workers is even better. Alien Frontiers is my favourite dice-placement game. It’s retro sci-fi theme might not appeal to everyone, but the dice rolling and allocation is such a great mechanic. The fact that points are very tight and very public, creates a wonderful tension. If you include the factions expansions, an already great game become even better as players have a different starting position.

Raiders of the North Sea

This has everything going for it, fantastic art, a great theme and a very unique worker placement mechanism. On top of all of this it adds just the right amount of player interaction with the cards/crew. The game has a great flow that changes as you play it. It seems like such a simple game on paper but really offers lots of depth once you’ve played it a couple of times. Raiders of the North Sea plays pretty quick, offers interesting choices each turn, smooth gameplay and offers a very different setup each time.

Five Tribes

When I first tried Five Tribes about 2 ½ years ago I thought it was an ok game, not a great game but just ok. This has slowly changed since then, with me liking it more and more with each play. Sure, it’s not a great game if you play with people that try to analyze everything, but it has so much to offer for those who don’t. Its basic mancala mechanism and the rules for each tribe is easy to teach, but each game feels very different thanks to the random setup. There are so many different ways to win the game, and it even works great as a 2 player game. A game I love now and that I’ll gladly play any day.

In case you’re curious about what my last Top 6 Games looked like, you can find it here: Top 6 Games