Our Favorite Games of 2020
Wow. That sucked.
But, here we stand! 2020 came with a variety of challenges for our little business, but those pale in comparison to the challenges faced by the world at large. We have voluntarily remained mostly closed during the pandemic, open only for retail and game rentals for the majority of the year. With community support we’ve managed to keep our lights on during a trying time for small businesses everywhere, and have even begun expanding into the realm of board game publishing by contracting with our first designer and artist.*
(*shameless plug [pug?] alarm - watch for Heckin’ Hounds, a trick-taking game exploring the perils of professional dog walking in the Underworld, crowdfunding in 2021.)
Despite the hardships and the setbacks, we still found time to connect with our favorite hobby, and we thought it would be fun to share what particular games caught our attention and left a lasting impression on us this year. As with our prior “Favorite” lists, this won’t be a collection of games that exclusively came out in 2020, though some will have. It will be focused on things that happened to cross our paths this year regardless of when they actually released - so “new to us.” Here are a handful of games we particularly enjoyed!
PART I : JAMES
Light Strategy Games
Masters of the Renaissance: Lorenzo il Magnifico -The Card Game (2020)
The first game on my list might also be a pick for one of the most underrated light games to come out in a while. It released quietly at the beginning of 2020 as a streamlined companion to its older, more complex sibling Lorenzo il Magnifico (2016), and is a tighter, cleaner, and more interesting game than it gets credit for (in my opinion).
The most obvious and unique thing about the game is the marble contraption, used to collect resources. You pick a row or a column, collect the resources matching the color of the marbles contained in that row or column, and then push the one loose marble into that row or column, knocking a new marble free and restructuring the entire market of resources available for other players.
This offers some interesting decisions to make regarding what resources to take, what to deprive from your opponents, and what opportunities to leave for the other players - but you have to keep in mind your own extremely limited space to store things. You only have six spaces to store resources naturally, with additional restrictions on what you can store in those six spaces. To access your lockbox and open up space for more resources, you will have to run those resources through the conversion engine you’ve been building from purchased cards.
The intersection between resource storage, resource conversion, and the marble contraption makes a component that could have easily been a tactile gimmick into an essential element of gameplay. For me, light strategy games need to accomplish at least one of the following three goals:
Does the game provide decisions that seasoned gamers can find interesting in a tight time frame?
Does the game introduce newer gamers to essential game mechanics in a digestible way?
Does the game provide an interest-capturing table presence, either through exceptional art or tactile enjoyment?
Some of the most popular light games with comparable mechanics capture some, but not all of these ideal qualities for me. Admittedly both the art and the theme of Lorenzo il Magnifico : the Card Game may not be terribly interesting to everyone, but this game offers a light experience touching on engine building, card drafting, set collection and resource management in digestible ways, presents interesting decisions game-to-game for any level of gamer, and offers a viscerally satisfying tactile experience.
Cooperative Games
Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion (2020)
Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion could not have arrived at a more perfect time for me. As a parent of two small children, opportunities to play sprawling, epic dungeon crawlers are few and far between these days, despite the magic and fun those experiences can be. The arrival of Gloomhaven (2017) coincided loosely with the birth of our first child, and after just a few scenarios the hours-long ritual of extensive game setup, reading unique scenario rules, playtime, and takedown had to give way to the requirements (and exhaustions) a new child can bring.
Our second child was born in March of this year, and soon after Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion came out. The game was marketed as a familiar Gloomhaven experience with less commitment, easier setup, and a streamlined tutorial, all without sacrificing depth of play or immersion into the world. That is a difficult spread of targets to hit, but it impressively delivered on every single one of those commitments.
Gloomhaven is already well-regarded among tabletop gamers, so I won’t spend a ton of time delving into gameplay specifics. I will mention the single greatest improvement Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion has over its predecessor though - campaign books instead of dungeon tiles. The original Gloomhaven substituted the typical unnecessary bloat of plastic miniatures with standees perfectly, cutting down the footprint of the game while also making the few miniatures that are in the game actually mean something (you, the heroes of the story, are the miniatures). Still, the original game had a sizable pile of punchboard dungeon tiles to try to organize and setup each time you wanted to play. Jaws of the Lion does away with this entirely, giving you two scenario books that function as the dungeon. Once you connect the relevant pages both the play area of the scenario, and the unique rules of that scenario, are right there after three seconds of effort.
Jaws successfully condensed the Gloomhaven experience in every way - footprint, setup time, learning curve, and price - without sacrificing quality. It is the game Jes and I have played the most together this year, and is my favorite co-op experience.
Card Games
Vampire: The Masquerade - Rivals (2021)
Yes, 2021. This card game hasn’t actually released yet, but during the Year of Social Distancing I had the opportunity to playtest Vampire: The Masquerade - Rivals extensively thanks to Renegade Game Studios letting me take part in the process. I can say with reasonable confidence that (cough right now at least) I’m probably among the top 15 players in terms of total games played (cough excluding skill).
And there’s no reason for me to have played it that much unless I quite enjoy it.
Card games are where I got started in tabletop gaming, and have remained an essential part of my gaming bread and butter since the TCG boom of the late 90s/early 00s. Vampire: The Masquerade - Rivals shares some similarities with Vampire: The Eternal Struggle (1994), but with a number of updated concepts and fresh takes.
VtM:R has you take on the role of a powerful vampire clan from the classic Vampire: The Masquerade roleplaying universe. You’ll start the game with a Haven, an Agenda, and a Leader of choice, three cards that provide initial unique abilities and a path to victory from the onset. All of these things are interchangeable and customizable - the core box will come with a variety of Havens, Agenda, and dozens of vampires spread across four different clans, any of whom you can choose to make the Leader of your coterie (that’s fancy vamptalk for your team). You’ll recruit more vampires from hand (drawn from your Crypt deck), and have a wealth of tools at your disposal for advancing your win objective or decimating your rival (drawn from your Library deck).
You win in one of three ways, with different clans focusing on different paths to victory:
reduce your rival (randomly determined among players at the beginning of the game) to zero prestige (the resource by which you recruit and reanimate vampires);
eliminate all of your rival’s vampires in play; or
gain thirteen Agenda points.
My favorite features are the social components built into the gameplay. VtM:R plays up to four people, and a game with three or four will have a large amount of table talk, negotiations, backstabbing, and difficult decisions. You can be forced into protecting an opponent just to keep the game from ending before you can claim victory for yourself, or watch as someone is forced to attack the player who calls you rival, saving you from the brink of death and suddenly opening up your chance at a dark horse victory.
Vampire: the Masquerade - Rivals has been a fun experience of peeking behind the curtain of game design, and I can say without bias that it offers a breath of fresh air in a market increasingly saturated with one versus one, units on a field card games. I’m looking forward to VtM:R’s release and announcements concerning organized play, particularly in the wake of COVID-19.
Strategy Games
A Feast for Odin (2016)
I’m super late to the Viking party. Dinner. Feast. Whatever. I’m late to try A Feast for Odin.
Can you really blame me? That’s an intimidating box! I’ve wanted to play Feast since release, but often my role in my gaming experiences is as “the teacher.” This is usually accomplished by perusing the rulebook or watching a video and then going at it, but for a game like A Feast for Odin I don’t feel confident trying to teach it until I’ve gotten a full play of it myself. I don’t want the folks sitting at the table with me to have a confusing - or even worse, a boring - experience while I constantly thumb through and consult the rulebook. I fully admit that’s a me issue and not a game issue, but it’s the truth.
Further caveat that I’ve still only played A Feast for Odin solo, though multiple times. During social distancing, and after consulting the solo gamer community and finding Feast is regarded as among the best solo experiences, I wanted to finally give it a go.
With that out of the way, I regret not playing it sooner. It’s not hugely complex a game, though it does have an insane breadth of options. There’s a handful of things going on in Feast, but the core of your Viking accomplishments are achieved through worker placement, and this is where the breadth of options comes into play. The majority of worker placement games have somewhere around fifteen places you can deploy your workers. A Feast for Odin has over fifty.
But, even that description is a bit loaded. A lot of the spaces available are just more or less efficient versions of different spaces, opening up as you gain more resources to convert. Or nicer boats. Or bigger storehouses. Or you’ve stolen enough treasure. Or killed enough whales. All assuming in the solo mode you’ve not stolen these available spaces from…yourself.
Okay fine, it’s a complicated game. But, it’s a surmountable and rewarding one. Never does any inclusion in A Feast for Odin feel unnecessarily fiddly. There are moments where the mounting analysis of optimal actions, coupled with the Tetris-like quality of fitting goods into various boards to unlock better income and different goods, alongside trying to leave yourself an avenue to feed all these Viking mouths, can bring the game to a momentary pause while you consider your options. But these slowdowns are worth the eureka moments the game provides when you chart your way forward. A Feast for Odin gave me one of the more strategically rewarding solo gaming experiences I’ve ever had.
Viscounts of the West Kingdom (2020)
In Viscounts you are (surprise!) a viscount in a time of waning monarch influence. You still need to respect the throne, but you also need to consolidate power of other forms to hedge your bets should the crown fall, whether through the support of the general populace, the backing of the church, or with the cold, hard acquisition of property.
If that sounds like an oddly specific theme, consider that, in my opinion, it actually fits the mechanics of the game perfectly. At its core the game is a victory point affair - have the most at game end, and win. But, it won’t always be as simple as building the best engine for pumping influential meeples into the court, or placing all your buildings on the outside of the board, or writing the most flourishing manuscripts.
Like the dwindling power of the crown as time goes forward, your viscount can only ever go one direction. You are always moving clockwise around the modular board rondel style, with limited options restricted by this movement. This will often thrust diversity into your plans as you are forced to do things like mingle with clerics when you’d rather be building another workshop.
There’s a similar thread to many of the Raiders/West Kingdom games that I think consistently places them in my top played of the year. To describe every mechanic and facet of gameplay can sound incongruous, but when you actually experience them the cohesion is suddenly obvious. Multiple systems, thoughts, and mechanics fold into each other in a way that makes things click midway through your first play in a satisfying way. Viscounts continues this string of cohesive accomplishment while providing unique mechanical combinations.
Solo Games
First, a brief word on solo games.
2020 was my introduction into solo gaming for obvious reasons, and there are a lot of very well done solo variants of regular board games. From A Feast for Odin discussed above, to the automa included in most Stonemaier games, to the fun of playing a dungeon crawler two-handed, all of these can provide an exceptional solo experience. Still, in these instances the solo aspect is made to either simulate the intended purpose of the game, or to provide a compelling method of play that compliments the intent of the game. As well done as they might be, they weren’t the designer’s original vision.
I’m contrasting this with the following two games that were made to be a solitary experience. While they do share similarities, they are distinct enough in weight and theme that I wanted to include them both. In my case all were enjoyed in the relative quiet with a drink, and something about the cozy ritual of it made me appreciate them more. Where a normal boardgame involves a designer facilitating interactions among folks at the table, these are almost like having a conversation with the designers themselves. In that way, it’s easy with these solo only games (though perhaps cheesy) to imagine you’re sitting across from the designer with a beer, diving into their thoughts and ideas.
Coffee Roaster (2015)
Coffee Roaster was an impulse purchase right before the pandemic hit us stateside, and coincided with a personal interest in roasting coffee. I was open to a solo-only experience, but hadn’t yet set aside the time to give it a shot. Months later the unplayed game caught my eye on the shelf while I was roasting coffee alone across the Parlor, and it felt very inappropriate not to give it a try in that moment.
Coffee Roaster is a bag builder with a heavy push-your-luck element. Every turn you’ll be “roasting” a certain amount of coffee beans drawn randomly from your bag, and exchanged with the bank for a token higher. A “0” would represent a green, unroasted coffee bean, with each number up to a “4” representing a darker and darker roast. The game has a variety of different target roasts and initial bag compositions, effectively offering a ton of replayability and different levels of difficulty.
The push-your-luck element comes into play when you consider the level of roast you want, and the risk you run if you roast another round. The game has no set ending - you choose when you’ll be done roasting. But, anything above that “4” number mentioned earlier will be a burnt, charred, undrinkable husk of a bean, so the longer you roast the greater the risk of filling your bag with negative points, though you do have a variety of special powers and abilities to try to mitigate any mistakes. Once you choose to be done roasting you’ll proceed to the cup test, where you’ll draw a number beans from your bag and hope you hit the sweet spot of a delicious Sumatran roast, and not a cup of sweet smoky hot garbage (which is my specialty, as seen below).
Coffee Roaster is a light game laced with a quirky theme, and admittedly if you don’t like the occasional cup of morning Joe you may not enjoy it as much as the next solo game in my list. But if you’re like me, and love the thought of some quick bag-building, luck-pushing goodness alongside a warm beverage, you may enjoy Coffee Roaster as much as I do.
Warp’s Edge (2020)
If the gameplay just described sounded interesting, but you prefer a more thrilling, high-stakes theme, Warp’s Edge is absolutely the solo bag builder for you. In Warp’s Edge you are the pilot of an experimental ship taking on an alien mothership all on your own…and you are destined to lose.
However, the “experimental” part of your ship is the warp, which will throw you back to the beginning of the encounter on death, and gives you four chances to save humanity with the additional power and knowledge gained from the prior encounters.
The gameplay is reminiscent of Coffee Roaster with some extra challenges. For one, the mothership (four different kinds with varying complexity) is aided by a deck of smaller ships that will be blasting away at the hull of your ship (of which there are four different kinds with different powers). You will be working to either destroy them, evade them, or use the unique special powers of your ship, all represented by the tokens drawn from your bag. As the game goes on, in the midst of destroying and evading enemies, you will be upgrading the contents of your bag to stronger laser attacks, more impressive evasive maneuvers, and a variety of other explosive benefits each individual ship can bring to the battlefield.
The result of these awesome elements is a game that is a little longer, a little more complex, and noticeably more strategic than Coffee Roaster. While I’ve not yet had the opportunity to dive into it, the game also comes with campaign booklet, charting a story and letting you make game-influencing decisions as you explore the world.
If you had asked me to guess what my ideal solo experience was prior to this year, I’d probably have gone with the solo mode for some epic, sprawling, heavy game. I’d only have been partially right. I do love these types of games, but as time and energy become harder to come by with the current phase in my life, quicker, simpler, smaller solo gameplay experiences are more valuable to me than I expected, which is why I love these two particular games.
PART II : JESSICA
Oh 2020. Everyone is so happy to see you go. Even I, who welcomed a beautiful baby girl this year, have to admit you've been a real stinker. We've all been cooped up together with no fun stuff allowed! Just day after day of waking, eating, staring at each other, eating, sighing dramatically, eating, feeling existential dread, eating, watching TV, eating, thinking about eating, eating, and sleeping. The only release has been television shows and games. That's why you're here right? To see what cute, relaxing, cat-themed game I'm recommending this year? Well you came to the WRONG place! This year was all about stress, anxiety, and questioning your life choices.
No. 3
Dual Powers: Revolution 1917 (2019)
Let's go easy mode first.
Dual Powers: Revolution 1917 is a light area control game set in 1917 amidst the power vacuum left by the murder…err, deposition of Tsar Nicholas II and his family. Read about it. It's uh… you know nevermind. It's all pretty dark. With the monarchy destroyed, Russia needs leadership with either the Provisional Government set up by royalist cronies, or Lenin, Stalin, and the Soviets ready to take power. The Will of the People is a powerful tool whose favor you'll need if you're to secure a victory.
As a player, you'll mostly be deploying troops to different areas and the player with superior numbers will gain or maintain control. The calendar advances as you play cards, with certain historical events triggering during certain months, while every action you take hastening the moment Trotsky joins the Soviets. In my experience, if the Provisional Government doesn't have a solid lead then, the Soviets will steal a victory fast.
While it's stressful trying to outmaneuver your opponent and gain the Will of the People, it's not an overly-complicated system. You must end the year with the people's support, or you risk the same gruesome fate as the Romanovs. Turns are straightforward with a beautifully color-coded map and cards. I personally love the art and styling of the board; I'm a big sucker for art in any game but this one is particularly transcendent. It elevates the dark subject matter into a fun, albeit tense tug-of-war game. It's a beautifully produced game with historical exposition that's easy to teach to those unfamiliar with modern board games.
No. 2
Nemesis (2018)
Okay. I have to breathe before this one because I've got lots of feelings; granted most of said feelings are nostalgia for the Alien franchise. The dread and nightmarish terror of being alone on a spaceship, which is going to hell fast, with a giant monster lurking around every corner is encapsulated in this game. Every movement into a new room turns your belly, with entirely too much to fix and figure out before the ship or the monster kills you. Full disclosure: James and I only played two-player and completely cooperative, but it was still extremely difficult. I can't imagine how difficult it becomes playing it with a betrayer.
The turns consist of spending action points moving, searching, or playing cards from your hand. Everyone receives a personal goal just to make the game even harder. The room tiles are randomized for variability; you may never find the inevitable death that is the Queen's nest, or it could be the next tile over from your starting location. The randomness is punishing, but let's be real here - you didn't come to this game for tranquility and fairness. You came to fight the Alien (really you should run from it though).
Discover rooms, search for survival items, find the right coordinates to earth, check the engines, fix the hibernation pods, figure out if you're already infected, give the dead a proper funeral, and mostly run and hope to God you don't stumble upon the Queen's nest. You should be running!
Why is Nemesis my second favorite of the year? It feels like everything I could have hoped for in a horror survival game. Sorry Dead of Winter, there's a new boss on the scene! The whole production is really fantastic, from the insane quality of the miniatures to the acrylic tokens. There's even a campaign with a comic book you can try, it's amazing! I would play it all the time, if… and here’s the rub. If it wasn't so difficult, and not just from the gameplay perspective. There's a lot going on, and a lot of small minutia to remember from the rules. It's too much for all-the-time play. The first half of our first game we played portions of it wrong and managed to make the game harder, if that's possible! James and I aren't novices at this, there’s just a steep learning curve unabashedly casting off newbies without remorse from an otherwise appealing theme. Without an experienced player at the table, deciphering a proper play of Nemesis will be tiring, and because the rest of the game is so brutally unforgiving it's hard to put this anywhere but second. It's amazing. It's terrifying. It's relentless. It's not for the faint of heart or the novice.
No. 1
Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion (2020)
Oh no! Has it finally happened? Have I finally played a game that I have ZERO complaints about? That never happens! I'm a complainer. I whine. I find the worst in everything. Disappointment is in my bones!
Yet here we are. Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion is easily the best dungeon crawler I've ever played - it's probably the best game I've ever played. The learn-to-play guide deserves an award. Gold star. Blue ribbon. #1 at the State Fair. It teaches you everything you need to know to play the campaign in five scenarios, and it's freaking genius. I have no desire to explain any of the mechanics because you can try this for yourself. It's all in plain English, explained slowly, each scenario adding to your knowledge like a beautiful Gâteau opéra. Simple. Clean. Delicious. Layered.
What I love most about this game is the challenge of each scenario. There's a story, sure, but for me it's irrelevant. I know - blasphemy. The story isn't why I've been playing this game every week for 20 weeks. I'm playing it because it's the closest experience I've had to raiding in World of Warcraft. Since I aged out of that particular time sink years ago, there has always been a void left that every few years I try in vain to fill with various games and MMOs. Never in my life would I have thought a board game could scratch that same itch.
Each scenario is a puzzle to solve, but often the games boil down to managing the monsters before you're exhausted or dead. James and I have lost on more than one occasion from our inability to plan our approach precisely. Many games have brought us to the wire - James is dead and I have to hit the target for a tiny bit of damage or it's over. (Don't laugh, the Voidwarden isn't always the best at smacking things!) Or I'm collapsed without any actions left to take, and James is now trapped with a boss and a never ending stream of monsters lurching up the stairs.
It can be difficult, but it's so satisfying when you get it right.
I could go on and on about this game and why it's so good. There's fun writing, the map booklet over dungeon tiles elevates Jaws of the Lion above its predecessor, there's… you know what? I'm not going to delve into it anymore. With a learn to play guide that is so seamless and easy to pick up…seriously. Just try it!
PART III : DISCORD COMMUNITY
In 2019 we started a Discord channel, and it’s grown to over a hundred gamers near and far all chatting daily on a variety of topics, especially games! We thought it would be fun to ask what everyone else’s favorite games were this year. Here are some of the results.
The Crew : The Quest for Planet Nine (2019)
“The Crew is a surprisingly fun co-op trick taker. It takes the limited communication of Hanabi and makes a game complex enough to really stretch the limits of the format, that is also a campaign style game without the price or the fiddle.”
- PineTreeQ
CLANK! Legacy - Acquisitions Incorporated (2019)
“The combination of deck-building, the Clank! mechanic, and pushing our luck deeper down to unlock new content made for both some epic escapes to safety as well as some player deaths. The Acquisitions Inc. theme was integrated in wonderfully humorous ways but you don't have to have any pre-awareness of their D&D podcasts to enjoy the game.”
- Tricen
Dwellings of Eldervale (2020)
“Dwellings of Eldervale has teeth in the game of the year discussion. I didn't want to say that right away, but another play and it's all I can think about. It's so good.”
-Homash
Inhuman Conditions (2020)
"Inhuman Conditions is a two-player social deduction game that works great with an audience. One player plays an investigator trying to discover whether or not the other player is a robot. Each player must role play an investigation similar to the tests in Blade Runner, after being given prompts from the deck of cards. With the right group of players, you can enjoy a long night of social deduction without hating your friends afterwards."
- FrozenPeach
As we move into 2021 there’s a handful of games on our horizon that we’d like to try - our Kickstarter copies of Blood on the Clocktower, Frosthaven, Stars of Akarios, and Tortuga 2199, in addition to a number of games that have been out for a while that we’ve not gotten to dive into yet. More than anything though, we’re looking forward to some sense of normalcy returning to the world, though with some lessons learned and adaptations kept. We’ve missed gaming with you fine folks, and we’re looking forward to doing it again sometime in 2021. Have an awesome new year.