I Need This Board Game...

The Heavyweight Collection - 10 Games + 1 Expansion ($550 CAD/$430 USD)     Worker Placement: Farming: Agricola ($65 CAD/$50 USD) + Farmers of the Moor ($45 CAD/$35 USD) City Building: Le Havre ($80 CAD/$60 USD) Super Heavy: Kanban ($60 CAD/$50 USD) Role Selection: Puerto Rico ($40 CAD/$35 USD) Action Selection: Terraforming Mars ($60 CAD/$50 USD) Network Building: Power Grid ($45 CAD/$35 USD)   2-Player: Abstract: Hive Pocket ($25 CAD/$20 USD) War: Twilight Struggle ($60 CAD/$40 USD) Filler: Love Letter ($10 CAD/$10 USD) Party: Captain Sonar ($60 CAD/$45 USD)

Now that 2018 has wrapped up, it's time to look back at some of the highlights of the year as well as at some personal stats. Personal stats are always fun. I know it is well into February now, but there were a lot of stats to compile and rankings to complete! This was the first year I started tracking games, which I did using the BG Stats app. Although it was tough to get used to at first, it is now second nature for me to record plays. For me, I have been recording any game I play regardless of whether it is in person, on an app, or online as long as it is not against AI. So this includes solo plays of games or online games against anonymous players. As an aside, I will be listing a bunch of games below and will be probably posting short posts based on these lists, so keep an eye out for a deeper breakdown of the following lists. Based on this tracking, I played 1001 games this year . Since I didn't really start tracking until about March, I also did not play much between t...

# of Players:  2-6 Playtime:  0-30 Minutes Core Mechanic: Bluffing Theme:  Animals Type:  Party Weight:  Light Year:  2004 Rating: 7.5* In all fairness, at first glance this does not look like a game that I would play. I don't mind fillers at all, but this one didn't look particularly appealing nor did word "Poker" in its name help since I thought it might just be a variation on poker, which was something I was not interested in trying. It never hit my radar until Shut Up and Sit Down did a review where they raved about how great the game is. The gameplay seemed interesting enough, even though the idea of no winners but instead one loser didn't really seem like the best one, so I eventually hunted a copy down which wasn't a problem since the price point is really low. There isn't much of a theme to this game. The game is all about bluffing and reverse set collection, which will make sense in a bit. The deck of cards is equally...

A classic and well-balanced game like Puerto Rico does not need expansions. Then I found out there were two mini-expansions and these were included with the deluxe version of the game, so why not try them out? Expansion I - New Buildings This expansion adds 12 small violet buildings and 2 large violet buildings to the game that can be used in place of the original buildings. To select which ones to use, these are combined with the buildings from the base game and drafted until 12 small and 5 large buildings have been selected. Once selected, the game is played without any other changes. The new buildings changes the strategy of the game in small but interesting ways. For examples, Aqueducts boost the relatively weaker indigo and sugar goods. The Black Market is also an interesting building that provides help with building by sacrificing colonists, goods, and/or victory points. Churches provide a victory point boost when building. For other ways of earning doubloons, the Lighthous...

For a brief recap of how I came up with my list, refer back to my previous post: 2018 Top 100 Games of All-Time - #100-91 Here we go with #20-11! Now we're into 2019 so I'll try to wrap up this last 20 quickly so I can move onto all that has happened in this last year! #20 - Steam The best train game I have played so far by a longshot. There are so many mechanisms at play - network building, pick-up and deliver, bidding -it all adds up to one satisfying experience. With now five map expansions available, there is plenty of content to work with. #19 - Caverna: The Cave Farmers With significantly less plays than Agricola and more interest in the other, more different Uwe Rosenberg games, this one has fallen a bit. Still, the gameplay is solid and I see why the wealth of choices this game presents is appealing. Players aren't tied down to any one strategy and going on expeditions is a lot of fun. #18 - Castles of Mad King Ludwig This game has fallen...

# of Players:  2-4 Playtime: 1-2 Hours Core Mechanic: Action Selection Theme:  Planting Type: Euro Weight:  Medium Year:  2017 Rating: 8* Towards the end of 2017, everyone was raving about this gorgeous and well-themed abstract game. It also looked light enough to be a gateway game but with some depth, which I am always on the lookout for. This was also the year for Azul and Sagrada, so a banner year for gateway abstracts. Could the table presence of Photosynthesis propel it to the top? Each player is a different species of trees trying to gain dominance in the forest. Each round, players will take turns collecting light points from the trees they have (Photosynthesis Phase) and taking actions using these light points (Life Cycle Phase). Play is centered around a board where the trees will grow and a rotating sun that will shine light on different parts of this forest. The game continues until the sun has made three revolutions around th...

Engine-building is an amazing feeling in board games. To see all your careful planning pay off as you are able to take better or more efficient moves or obtain more goods towards the end of the game is very rewarding. Engine-building is generally never the lone mechanism in a game, I'm not even sure if it qualifies as an actual mechanism, but most of my favorite games have this feature where you start of taking small moves, building an "engine" that over the game allows you to do more with the same move or sets off a chain reaction  that allows you to do multiple things efficiently, one after the other. The more I think of it, maybe this is not a mechanic after all since it isn't even listed on BoardGameGeek as one, but it is more of a feeling I get when I play games, and here are some of the games that evoke that feeling the best. The first game I played that really captured the feeling for me was Le Havre . A big component of this game was shipping goods in exchan...