Our Favorite Games of 2021
2021 is in the books! It was…a little less crappy than 2020, we’ll give it that.
Pandemic-related challenges remain but we’ve all slowly begun adapting to them. Towards the middle of 2021 we reopened for instore gaming once again on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and have seen a slow and steady climb towards our old levels of patronage, particularly now that the cold months have arrived. We also had a successful Kickstarter, raising just shy of $18,000 to publish our first game, Heckin’ Hounds, which begins production with our manufacturer soon after the new year. It’s also been a delightfully booze-filled year, getting to sample all variety of beers and wines now that we’ve enjoyed our first few months being open with a liquor license!
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 2021, 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
Meadow (2021)
Meadow is absolutely beautiful, with stunning watercolor works focused on the various flora and fauna that can be present right outside of our doors. I offer this from the outset because, unlike a heavy strategy game that can carry itself on the strength of gameplay, a lighter game often needs to have aesthetic chops to make the cut and appeal to a wider audience. Another game that comes to mind that accomplished this wonderfully was Wingspan (2019), which also has stunning table presence featuring beautifully illustrated birds that contributed heavily to the popularity of the title.
A second requirement for a successful light strategy game is ease of teaching. Meadow strikes a lovely balance between basic, easily digestible rules and enough strategic depth to keep the experience interesting from game-to-game, while still managing to appeal to seasoned gamers. At its core Meadow is a set collection and drafting style game, with rules for acquiring cards similar to Quadropolis (2016), wherein you use numbered tokens to decide how far into a row or column you want to acquire a card. Each card has a prerequisite nature symbol you have to already have in your set to play, but these symbols make a lot of intuitive sense. It comes naturally that you would need grass before playing the grasshopper, or the grasshopper before playing the bird, or the bird before playing the fox, and so on.
A light strategy game is often the vehicle of choice used to usher someone deeper into the tabletop gaming hobby, and last year I laid out three targets the ideal strategy game hits:
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?
In my opinion, Meadow captures all three of these wonderfully. The three separate decks of cards (and the mid-game introduction of a different, more advanced deck to build your nature observation skills further), alongside a handful of single-use player powers, offer enough variability game-to-game to keep things interesting for the hobbyist. It also introduces set collection and card drafting concepts, and accomplishes all of this with stunning, hand-painted watercolor illustrations that give the game captivating table presence. All of these factors come together to make Meadow one of my favorite light strategy games played in 2021.
Picture Perfect (2020)
I wanted to include something I consider a novelty game in my list, because I played a handful of good ones this year. Ultimately I was stuck between Picture Perfect (2020) and Dive (2021) for this spot but (spoiler alert) Dive gets a shoutout later, so I wanted to make certain Picture Perfect got in the frame as well.
When I describe a boardgame as a novelty game, I’m saying that they have some kind of specific unique hook that is their main draw, often a physical element. In Picture Perfect everyone has the same set of people standees being assembled to take a large group photograph, though every person has a set of preferences they want accomplished in the photo (X wants to stand in the front, Y wants to be in the back, Z doesn’t want their face visible, etc.). These preferences are listed on cards contained in an envelope for each character, and players will be trying to get as much of this information as possible over a series of rounds, adjusting people and gravy bowls along the way, before you snap your picture. Literally. With your phone.
I can’t speak to the replayability of Picture Perfect for the same player over frequent plays, but I can safely say it’s a very fun and quirky concept. It also occupies a unique space of being completely teachable to non-hobbyist gamers; Picture Perfect has such an easy ruleset that you can teach it to anyone, whether or not they’ve played a game since Battleship (1931). There’s something to be said for a game you can bring to the table no matter the company you have, that has a unique concept and draw many people will never have seen before. Few games include a memento photo saved on your phone as the preferred method of scoring. I very much appreciate games that can bring both gamers and nongamers together to the table for a fun experience, and Picture Perfect does this with enough success to be one of my favorite light games played this year.
Card Games
Summoner Wars: Second Edition (2021)
I have a very potent weakness for card games. Collectible card games (CCGs) were my entry into the hobby, and I have a closet full of dead card games from the late 90s/early 00s filled with fond memories of cracking packs and learning new rules, though as I matured the magic of the chase faded to a bit of bitterness towards the cost of the business model on the player.
The first edition of Summoner Wars came out over a decade ago now, and it was one of the few noncollectible games that has scratched the strategic itch of CCGs for me. It was incredibly fun, with unique factions playing across a grid that gave the game spatial elements reminiscent of a lifestyle miniatures game.
The Second Edition takes a winning formula, corrects and tightens a few rules, reimagines and fine tunes some of the factions, and revamps the art (and while not everyone prefers the new style, I quite enjoy it myself!) into a new experience that deserves more attention and love. It is incredibly easy to teach and understand, with a relatively simple ruleset that squeezes every possible drop of depth from itself.
Summoner Wars Second Edition is the best non-collectible two-player strategy card game ever made, in my opinion. It is the perfect choice for any older gamer that occasionally reminisces about their time with Magic: the Gathering (1993), but has no desire to take the plunge into an expensive lifestyle game - but it has a far greater range than just that. It can be played without any deckbuilding at all, but if you choose to customize your deck of cards it comes with a streamlined system designating what pools of cards you can add from, keeping it from being the unwieldy beast that could turn off some players. It has elements of movement reminiscent of many board or miniature games - a unit can take cover behind a wall to avoid the arrows of an archer in range. This can appeal to the player turned off by the disembodied tableau of units just sitting across from each other that most traditional CCGs are.
If I had any criticism of Summoner Wars, it’s that there isn’t any cohesive organized play system, league support, or player locator. Summoner Wars has all the gameplay chops to compete for a lifestyle-light player base I believe exists; players hesitant to opt into the financial and time commitments of a lifestyle card or miniatures game, but open to the lesser level of commitment Summoner Wars offers for some of the same depth of play. Ultimately though, this boils down to a selfish criticism of wanting more opportunities to play the game, which really only reinforces why Summoner Wars is my favorite card game played in 2021.
Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition (2021)
A few years back I listed Terraforming Mars (2016) as one of my favorite strategy games in a similar yearly article, for being a deeply satisfying economic and tableau building game with a science fiction, realism-adjacent setting. It still remains an incredibly enjoyable experience, though it does have some unwieldiness baked into it. For one, the games (without any expansions) take a while to reach a critical mass of interesting interactions. This isn’t strictly a negative - starting slow and building a lumbering colossus of cards and resources that suddenly have momentum, propelling you to endgame can be very fun - but Terraforming Mars had a longer build up period than some.
It’s also messy, with cubes scattered across every playable surface tracking everything. Tracking oxygen. Tracking plants. Tracking points. Tracking steel. Tracking titanium. Tracking my heat. Tracking your heat. Tracking Mars’ heat. And (without expansions giving you an updated indented playerboard) one nudge of the table can send a few cubes out of place and leave you scrambling to recall how many potatoes you had ready to shove into Martian dirt.
These are honestly minor quibbles for an amazing game, but Terraforming Mars : Ares Expedition takes the core of what makes the original Terraforming Mars fun and condenses it into a forty-five minute experience that takes up less tabletop real estate. And less cubes.
Some resources are removed from the game entirely in their old form, replaced with an ever-present discount you don’t have to adjust and manage as often. The map is also shrunk, only serving to track the shared Martian climate, points, and oceans; but the biggest change is the addition of an action selection mechanic reminiscent of games like Race for the Galaxy (2007). The game has a number of phases allowing you to do certain things - draw cards, purchase cards, produce resources, use actions on cards, and so on - and each player will choose one phase to activate that turn. This makes turns snappier, and also creates an added layer of strategy in trying to predict what your opponents may select so you can maximize the effectiveness of your turn.
Despite the streamlined gameplay, Ares Expedition maintains the core strategic experience with nearly as much depth. I found it every bit as fun to play as the original Terraforming Mars, and while it doesn’t completely replace the original game for me, it will likely see more play for being a much quicker, more compact experience, and was one of my favorite card games played in 2021.
Strategy Games
Lost Ruins of Arnak (2020)
Lost Ruins of Arnak came out around the same time as Dune: Imperium (2020), with both happening to occupy the same relatively new worker placement / deckbuilding-blended genre. Despite similar mechanics, they both stand alone as amazing games that I enjoy equally, but (spoilers) Dune gets a shoutout later, so I’m focusing on Lost Ruins of Arnak.
Thematically, Arnak is something akin to an Indiana Jones experience, but one you can approach from multiple different angles. Numerous unknown locations are waiting to be explored for resources, and once a worker discovers a location the rewards for going there are revealed alongside a random monster spawning at the newly-discovered space. The monster can be defeated for a victory point bonus, and the riches of the new location put to use.
There is also a research track taking up a large section of the gameboard, where you can spend resources to expand your archeological knowledge of the Arnak ruins. Researching rewards handsomely with resources that can be used at other places in the game, with numerous paths to choose from while moving up the track. Researching also provides different ways of getting resources, offering a method of per-round generation if that portion of the research track is prioritized.
All of this is accomplished through cards you’ll be purchasing from a market that either give you an immediate effect that turn (artifacts), or are tucked away into your discard pile to be shuffled and used at a later point (items). These cards both grant you resources and give you the tools you need to traverse the board and go the spots you’d like to interact with. The distinction in the types of cards offers some spontaneous decision-making options not always present in deckbuilders, with a way to benefit from some cards now rather than always keeping an eye on a future turn.
At its core Lost Ruins of Arnak is a midweight resource conversion game, but one using various mechanics in a very interesting and enjoyable blend. It hits a lot of positive notes all at once; while not narratively deep, the game is absolutely beautiful, both with the art and the tactile components involved . I found myself fiddling with stone tablets and arrows while contemplating my turns. “Not narratively deep” is not intended to be a negative - Arnak offers such a wealth of paths and options for players to choose from that a more abstracted and general “explorers on an uninhabited island” fits perfectly. Arnak blends deck building and worker placement in a deeply satisfying way, offering a wealth of options and paths to victory without excessive complexity, making it one of my favorite games played this year.
Dwellings of Eldervale (2020)
Apparently it was a year of enjoying a lot of “worker placement + X” games.
Dwellings of Eldervale was a wildly successful Kickstarter I unfortunately missed out on, with backers receiving the game in 2020. Thankfully Breaking Games allowed purchase of Kickstarter copies of the game (including the Deluxe version), and we were able to try the game this year after it received quite a bit of positive feedback towards the end of 2020.
Dwellings puts players in control of one of sixteen different factions seeking to control the eight elemental realms, accomplishing this by spreading out across various hexes and eventually building dwellings (NAME DROP) on them. Resources are gained primarily by placing workers on various elemental hexes in traditional worker placement fashion. One unique twist offered by Dwellings is the type of turn you choose to play - you can place your workers, or you can take what is called a regroup turn. When regrouping workers perform a second important task of activating cards in your tableau, often granting you additional resources or abilities on their way to being redeployed on the map, adding an engine building aspect to the game.
This is an extreme simplification of the most basic mechanics of the game, there are a wealth of strategic options turn-to-turn; giant roaming elemental monsters can be defeated and tamed, made to fight on your behalf. Special workers can be enlisted from your supply - a wizard, a warrior, and a dragon - with the ability to move quicker across tiles, attack with greater ferocity, or both. All of this is done with the backdrop of an elemental board, tracking your progress on mastering the eight magical elements that will ultimately decide how well you score at game end, alongside fulfilling the requirements of any special magic cards amassed in hand.
The components are also phenomenal. Each faction has a personalized game tray where everything is sorted and ready to go before the game even starts, all individual workers, pieces, and markers, with the faction board used in gameplay acting as the top of the case. This sounds like such a small touch, but for large sprawling games anything that makes getting it to the table easier is immensely appreciated. The version we have at the Parlor is also the Deluxe one, giving each of the elemental monsters an unique base that adds sounds as it smashes across the land. It’s silly, excessive, unnecessary, and…pretty damned cool. It’s hard to resist deliberately stomping the miniatures around, listening to their individual sounds. Even without this deluxe feature though, the thought and care put into packing away the game, and setting up for play, is hugely appreciated.
Dwellings of Eldervale was an epic adventure and a joy to play. It had stunning (and in the case of the miniatures, literally roaring) table presence, and blended worker placement, engine building, and area control into a deep experience while simultaneously being intuitive to learn. This intuitiveness, and how cleverly all these mechanics blend together to make an experience that is both relatively easy to grasp and epic in scope, made Dwellings a favorite I played this year.
PART II : JESSICA
When I sat down to start brainstorming this article, I scrolled through my ‘GAMES FOR WORK’ document and was astonished how long it had become. This is going to sound silly, but this is the first year I had the revelation to start keeping notes about the games that we played. Some of the things I wrote down don’t seem terribly relevant now, especially the tidbits and minor complaints about box inserts or how difficult something was to punch or unwrap. Still, James and I managed to play quite a few new games this year. (“New” meaning “new to us.”) I don’t know when we squeezed them in, but I apparently need to get Grandma and Grandpa a serious gift card for babysitting the kids so much.
What was really surprising was the breadth of games. Many games were more involved with bigger setups and brain-burning strategy, but we also played plenty of quirky, fast two-player games. Paring down this list to just five games has been a challenge, and I’ve broken the list into the fun/easy games and the strategic, more time intensive games.
Best “Easy” Games
Dive (2021)
Give this designer an award. I never thought I’d see those projector sheets from high school ever again, especially not in a board game. But here they are: tinted blue with sea creatures, all stacked on top of each other to form the infinite abyss. Peer into the crystalline waters to determine how far you can safely dive before you’re nose-to-nose with a shark!
Real quick run down: Air tokens are numbered 1 through 5 with a shark or sharkless side. Bet on your personal board how far you think you can dive, placing a shark-sided token where you believe a shark may be, or a sharkless token if you think you’re free and clear. Reveal the sheets one at a time. If you placed a white, sharkless token and there’s no shark on the sheet, hurray! You’re correct and can keep diving. Similarly, if you placed a blue shark-sided token and there was a shark, more hurray! You evaded the shark! Keep diving. If at any time you guess incorrectly, remove your token from your board at that level and any deeper levels. There’s points to be gained from manta rays and sea turtles, but in essence the person who can most clearly, correctly see into the waters and distinguish what’s there will be the winner.
I would honestly play a very modified version of this with my three year old. How many sheets down is that turtle or whale? Watch out, that’s a shark! The boy’s got ridiculously good finding skills so I’m sure he’d trash me at this. For playing with older kids (you know…who aren’t in preschool), the back of the booklet has a variety of modified versions of play, both for children and to add complexity to the base game.
I so thoroughly enjoyed playing this that I find myself suggesting it to groups that are looking for something fun and casual. It plays up to four and will take at most thirty minutes from set up to scoring. It’s lighthearted, has nice table presence, and the depictions of sea creatures and plant life are beautiful. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. I’ve lost every game I’ve ever played, but still had a really great time.
Meadow (2021)
I do love set collection games. This one, from art to theme to mechanics, just checks all the boxes for me. This game is a bit longer with four, closer to sixty minutes, but the art is so light and whimsical, you won’t feel like you’ve been sitting at the table for that long. This game reminded me of Quadropolis (2016), but I enjoy Meadow better personally.
Like Quadrolopolis, Meadow has a grid-oriented action retrieval mechanic. To build the tableau of your meadow, arrows are used to select a critter or insect from a specific row or column based on the number on that arrow. From your starting ground cards the animals, birds, plants, dwellings, or souvenirs will stack on top of each other if you meet their requirements, gaining you more and more points. There’s also the bonfire board which can let you take special turns or unlock extra points. Halfway through the game, more complicated cards will be added to the grid to bolster points.
Generally when I play these kinds of games, I worry about nothing other than my own goals, playing my own solitaire game amidst other people. James, however, just looooves to take that card that you needed to place a birdhouse!
It might be because we played this game on a miserable, rainy day, but the art and colors of this game really brightened my whole table. It lightened my mood. It’s silly, but I felt an actual longing to go for a hike after! If the weather had been better, or if I wasn’t such a wimp about getting wet, I totally would have. Meadow, more than any other game we played this year, won the Jessica Parsons Art of the Year award! It’s not a real award. There’s no cash value. Just my gratitude.
Best “Intermediate / Hard” Games
And now for the “hard” games. The games you’d better set aside most of the morning for. Schedule your bathroom breaks now, because you’re not getting up for an hour and a half (not including the set up).
Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition (2021)
Unpack this box and there’s a lot. A lot, a lot. An overwhelming amount of trackers and tokens await you. The personal resource tracker board contains a lot of condensed information, and you have to really sit and piece through each line to make sure you’re seeing everything. I can nearly guarantee that a new gamer watching someone unpack this box is going to give a hard glance at this and say… nope. Which is a shame. Because I felt this game, more so than the original Terraforming Mars, truly gives that planet/civilization building feeling.
Play as a corporation that’s investing oodles of money to make Mars as habitable as possible by maxing out the oxygen and temperature, and flipping all the ocean tiles. Like Race for the Galaxy (2007), there’s action selection during which you must choose the phase that you want or hope another will choose that phase for you. There’s a ton more to this, but I’m not going to go into a rule explanation because Rodney already did one, and let’s face it, he did a much better job than I could ever do.
I fully admit that this game hooked me early because it’s a sci-fi game. It’s an easy lead for me to play a game. I also fully admit that ever since I was exposed to simultaneous action selection in Roll for the Galaxy, I became a big fan. Lastly, it does involve building a civilization, albeit more abstractly, and that is a third big win for me. Plus, the designers had the foresight to make neat little trays to hold everything and the cardboard trackers nicely fit your cubes this time around.
Despite having a relatively simple ruleset, this was one of the more difficult games I played this year. When my action phase was triggered, I had such an engine built up by the end of the game that I had to do some serious arithmetic to make sure I scored everything. My brain was fried a good portion of the day after, though that’s probably sad and reveals more about my math-ing skills than anything else. James and I didn’t play a cut throat game of this either during one of our two-player games, we mostly just let each other do their own thing. Only at the end did he look up and see my massive point engine and he realized he needed to end the game quickly before I ran away with the points while he was busy dropping asteroids.
Summoner Wars: Second Edition (2021)
Oh man. This one gives me feels. Did you know James and I have our personal SLEEVED copy of the first edition master set in the library? This is the game that sort of started it all. The two of us on Saturday and Sunday mornings sitting with our coffee and scones dueling against each other in what I called, then, the best update to Stratego (1946) I’d ever played.
First edition will always have a place in my heart. But… I’m not going back now. They fixed so many of the quirks of the first edition that the second edition is a legitimately better game! The magic generation tracked via a tracker instead of an unwieldy pile of discarded/killed cards is an infinitely better system. They also fixed the end game inevitable dance of two units running around walls, staying out of line of sight, doing nothing, prolonging a game - now failing to attack in a turn will do damage to your summoner. Even the updated factions are great and reminiscent of the first edition. Plus the art update. Fantastic.
In sum, if you were a fan of the first, but had some nitpicky qualms with it, you’re going to be over the moon for the new one.
Did I mention you can try it online? I know, I know. You didn’t come here to read about online gaming, but it’s a useful tool for learning how the game works. It will also give anyone who’s never tried either edition a good sampling for whether or not this kind of head-to-head two player game is for them.
Best of the Best
Dune: Imperium (2020)
If you’ve ever stopped into the store and said in passing that you liked Dune, chances are I talked your ear off about it. Not the movie. I only saw the movie recently. I mean the seven book compendium that is the Dune Saga. I own all seven books and every iteration ever made for tv/film adaption; I’m not obsessed or anything. But I will say that when I was pregnant with my first born, I did sit in the bedroom alone and read it out loud so he could hear it. Is that weird? It sounds weird now, but it didn’t seem so then.…
I used to bemoan that I would never be able to play the older Dune (1979) game. I’d scan ebay to see if anyone was selling a copy. I even sent James a link to where he could buy me a $200 handmade wooden marquetry board for a game we didn’t have–for a game that wasn't even in print…. Eventually it was reprinted by Gale Force Nine, Dune (2019), but by then children made it difficult to get the ideal 5-6 player count together for three hours of court intrigue and backstabbing.
So when I say my expectations were high. Man oh man. I had to brace myself, expecting to be disappointed, but hoping the designers were as obnoxiously in love with the Dune universe as I was.
And I am pleasantly surprised!
I don’t have any faults with this game. I almost wish I did so I wouldn’t sound like such a lunatic. But when it comes to theming and strategy and nail-biting rounds, Dune: Imperium takes the cake. The Bene Gesserit are subversive and undermining, the Emperor is powerful and driven by money, the Spacing Guild will legitimately drop in forces to change the tide of battles for an obscene amount of spice, the Fremen are masters of the Dunescape, providing lethal fighters and surprise forces that fall out of revealed hands like Hunter Seekers in the dead of night. Players take on the role of one of the Houses fighting for control of the Spice. Spoiler alert! Being the head of one of the Great Houses is never good. The people around the table are no longer your friends. They are, at best, temporary allies. They would feed to Shai-Hulud for one ounce of spice.
There are mechanics in this game that I didn’t think would work together. At its core, it’s a card drafting game. But it’s also a worker placement game. But it’s also a territorial domination game. If that sounds complicated, well, yeah it kind of is. But there’s also no other way it could’ve been. To be a wielder of spice is to have your fingers in the fight for Arrakis while currying the favor of various factions, simultaneously hoping that someone else hasn’t one-upped you on that favor. What’s crazy is everyone at the table is fighting for a only a dozen points. That’s the margin you have for victory. No one crushes anyone, games are almost always decided within one or two points. A dark horse victory can come from two points behind and in one turn can bury the current leader with an intrigue card that turns the tide of the battle, losing them favor with a faction, and ultimately the game. It’ll feel like poetry.
I could honestly talk about this game and the books and how all of it ties beautifully together for an hour. Stop in sometime, maybe you’ll catch me. Ask me to teach you how to play, I’ll be more than happy to talk you to death then. Until then, Happy Holidays and Good Luck gaming!
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 Shipwreck Arcana (2017)
“The Shipwreck Arcana is a clever, minimalist cooperative deduction game, asking players to get their teammates to guess a hidden number using tarot cards. The rules on the table are always changing, logic and guessing work together, similar to actually reading a fortune. Even with the expansion, the entire game comes in at fewer than 40 cards, but the stylized art always makes such a small game feel so much bigger.”
- Hawkyle
The King’s Dilemma (2019)
“The King's Dilemma is a campaign game about arguing with your friends over fantasy politics, using gold and power to sway opinions, and ultimately voting on the future of a fantasy kingdom. It's the sort of social game that works so well because everyone's allegiances with each other are constantly changing as new issues come up for vote.”
- FrpzenPeach
Sleeping Gods (2021)
“Sleeping Gods is an exploration game with a large ocean map to sail around and a thick choose-your-own-adventure storybook full of quests and decisions to make. At its core you are managing resources - food, materials, crew health/status and command tokens (basically action points) to find mysterious totems in order to wake the Gods and make your way back home to our world. As you explore, you find items and companions that help you overcome challenges and defeat monsters in a unique combat system. You might only see 10% of the game content in a single playthrough. So on subsequent plays you can chart a completely new course or go back and explore the road not taken.”
-Tricen
As we move into 2022 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, Darwin’s Journey, 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 settling into a new sense of normal after years of pandemic-laden stress, though with some lessons learned and adaptations kept. We’re looking forward to seeing you all in a happier 2022. Have an awesome new year.