50 Games in 50 Weeks: Qwirkle Cubes
Qwirkle Cubes combines Scrabble with dice. The game comes with 90 six-sided dice. You draw a “hand” of six dice, which you roll immediately upon drawing. The first player places a set of dice in the middle of the game to form the “grid.” Play then proceeds in turns, with players adding dice to the grid, getting points for each die added of the same color in a row or column, and additional points for completing a row with […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Thurn and Taxis
Thurn and Taxis is a Euro board game that’s somewhat like Ticket to Ride. In addition to building routes, players also explicitly dominate regions. Your options are determined through a deck of cards, each representing a region on the board. Each turn, you can play a card to add a route in the region specified on the card. As your routes grow, you can score them, and as your routes connect cities, you can score […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Alhambra
Alhambra is a territory purchase game: you collect cards representing different kinds of money, then use that money to buy square pieces of a garden. You get points based on how many pieces of your garden you can fit together (each piece has some walled borders, and you must join sections appropriately), and the types […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: The Miskatonic School for Girls
This is a game about schoolgirls driven slowly crazy by horrible monsters, yet it’s quirky and fun. If you can’t imagine how that might be, this is the wrong game for you. Miskatonic School for Girls is a card game in which you build a deck of schoolgirls and school paraphernalia, face monstrous teachers, and try to drive other players’ girls crazy while protecting your own from paddling […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Gamma World 4E
4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons‘s modularity makes it suitable for many genres: the modern era, Spelljammer, and even the gonzo mutant future of Gamma World. For those unfamiliar: Gamma World was a D&D post-apocalyptic setting that included grenade-throwing rabbit-men, sentient plants, and crumbling radioactive cities. It’s a wonderful, ridiculous potpourri of post-apocalyptic elements. Gamma World 4E updates this with D&D 4E’s mechanical approach. A lot of people dislike 4E’s mechanics […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Dungeon Run
How do you make a dungeon crawl into a board game? I can’t think of a better way than Dungeon Run. The players start by choosing a hero, and placing it on the single dungeon entrance tile. The heroes then move to new rooms and fight monsters. Eventually, someone will find the Summoning Stone, turning the […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Giants (board game)
This is a fascinating game, both for its historical perspective and its mechanics. Giants simulates the behaviors of Easter Island’s inhabitants. You control the population, consuming the island’s resources and building giant stone statues. You have to quarry the stone, then move it to the coast for carving and erection. A few interesting mechanics: you need logs to move your statues, and there need to be people on all the game board spaces leading from […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Cthulhu Dice
Cthulhu Dice is an odd little game. On one hand, it’s dramatically simple: each player has three sanity tokens. On your turn, choose another player, roll a die, and do whatever the die tells you (take sanity from the other player, lose sanity, etc.). If you’re targeted by another player, you get a free die roll in response. Continue until only one player has any sanity […]