![]() It’s Parks Lite, and more accessible to younger players (the box suggests ages 10+, but there’s nothing here a 7- or 8-year-old couldn’t handle), and more portable with the smaller box too. The Badges can also give bonus actions or resources, and stacking those intelligently is a big key to the game. ![]() Some photos and badges also have bird icons, and the player with the most birds at the end of the game gets a 4 point bonus. You gather three different resources to meet the requirements of Badge cards at either end of the trail, and take photographs as you go for points. Players will traverse a single trail of seven tiles, moving back and forth as many times as they can before the sun sets by moving all the way from the last spot on Trail’s End to the very first spot on the Trailhead. Trails is the small-box sequel to Parks, taking the same theme and look but simplifying the mechanics and the goals for a shorter and easier-to-teach experience. I enjoy civ-builders but often find them too long or fiddly. ![]() Games play over nine rounds with simultaneous actions, so an hour playing time is quite possible once players get what they’re doing. The most powerful actions allow you to play Politics cards from your hand or to move up your Development track it’s hard, if not impossible, to win if you don’t max out the latter. Players roll two dice on each turn and assign any of six possible actions to those dice, but you have to pay Culture to use an action with a higher value than the die. This retheme of a Japanese game from a few years ago called Improvement of the Polis, a civilization-builder that dispenses with the resource-collection aspect of those game and instead has players move up eight different trackers, four on their own boards and four on the common board. It’s grim, but safety was never guaranteed. All your workers outside of safety pods or the underground tunnels are lost, and you score whatever’s left. Once you’ve exhausted the supply of Incident tokens, the sun has set, and the game ends. The limited spaces to play cards for their actions will lead you to use them for other purposes, like scrapping them for resources, and forces players to build efficient plans so that they can utilize the actions when that space is open, even repeating it up to three times if you have the inputs. Resources are always in short supply, and you only get to use your actions a handful of times, making this game exceptionally tight and tense. ![]() All data on player count, age ranges, and play time come from Boardgamegeek.Ī delightfully morbid game, Cryo has all players trying to rescue their workers from a crash-landing on a forbiddingly cold planet before the sun sets, which will kill any workers you haven’t sent to safety. There were some games that just missed this cutoff, like Red Cathedral (released in late November of 2020), that would have made the list otherwise, but I have to cut it off somewhere. One note: I considered any games that were first released in the United States from Dec. I’ll get to them soon, but there are only so many game nights in a year. There was such a flood of new titles at the end of this year that I haven’t been able to get through everything I wanted to try-the pandemic hasn’t helped matters either-so I’ll mention a few games in my review stack that might have made the cut if I’d had more time to play them: Oath, Dinosaur World, Equinox, Iberian Gauge, Islands in the Mist, Trails, Subastral, and more. If anything, it seems like we had more new games than usual coming out in the second half of 2021, which, if that’s true and not just my perception, is probably why this was the hardest year ever for me to choose which game to rank number one on this list. Supply-chain problems and an ongoing pandemic couldn’t hold back the tabletop world, which tried to reestablish some level of normalcy this year, between the return of major conventions like Gen Con and PAX Unplugged and a more typical release schedule for new titles.
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