Apiary is a worker placement game featuring a spacefaring race of bees. In most worker-placement games, once a worker is placed in an action spot, it’s blocked for other players. In Apiary, workers can be bumped off an action spot by other players, but the bumped worker can become more powerful and useful for future placements. This twist makes each turn a little more thought-provoking, but we find that our picks offer more complex and interesting choices overall.
Brian Boru: High King of Ireland is an area majority game powered by a version of trick-taking card play (much like Arcs). It also adds a drafting component that means players have much more control over what their hand looks like than in other trick-takers. Still, we found that Arcs’ use of the mechanic was more interesting overall.
Cascadia was very popular in our testing, and many testers who describe themselves as casual players enjoyed its straightforward-but-fun tile-laying puzzle. It was also named the best strategy game of 2022 by the American Tabletop Awards, and it won the prestigious 2022 Spiel des Jahres. But compared with our picks, it didn’t provide the strategic depth or complexity that we were looking for.
Crescent Moon is an asymmetric area control game set in the 10th-century Middle East. It casts players as factions trying to wrest control of various regions from each other by playing cards. It gave us a lot to chew on, but we feel that Root is a better entry point for beginners looking for a highly interactive, asymmetric game.
Furnace is a quick and fun economic engine-building game, with a counterintuitive, albeit interesting, auction system at its center. It’s quick to learn and satisfying to play, but we think Power Grid offers a more complete experience.
Gaia Project is a sprawling space opera where players terraform worlds, mine resources, research new technology, and build galaxy-spanning networks of planets through a mixture of engine building and resource management. It’s a lot of game, with a $100 price point to match. It was also a generator of analysis paralysis in our testing, with 14 different factions with unique powers and abilities for players to choose from. We think most folks will have a better time with our picks.
Kanban EV is an economic worker placement game that tasks players for eeking out every scrap of efficiency they can as they manage the production of new electric vehicles. It’s an intricate and engaging puzzle, with enough player options and actions to make even the most confident game player suffer from analysis paralysis. It’s a worthy challenge for experienced gamers, but in our playtest it wasn’t as satisfying as our picks, and the eye-watering price (usually around $120) doesn’t help.
Kutná Hora: The City of Silver is a complex economic game that casts players as wealthy families in the rapidly growing city of Kutná Hora. You play two-sided cards from your hand, choosing one of their two actions in an attempt to explore mines, negotiate with guilds, build out the city, and finish building a cathedral. Throughout the game, the value and cost of the materials you need shifts based on the actions taken, replicating an ever-shifting commodity market. It’s a clever system, and it leads to interesting outcomes. But ultimately we found the way Brass: Birmingham forces you to both rely on and compete with your rivals to be more complex and satisfying.
Living Forest won the 2022 Kennerspiel des Jahres (the world’s premier award for more-complex games), and it was fun when we played it on the online game engine Board Game Arena. Unfortunately, it sold out everywhere shortly after the award was announced. We hope it will come back in stock soon, and then we can get our hands on a copy, to test it properly.
SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has a commanding table presence. It’s colorful, expansive, and has a giant spinning solar system at its center. The game tasks players with sending probes, scanning the stars, and otherwise doing science-y things to try and make contact with alien intelligence. And when it happens in the game, it can reveal one of two random new alien species that will give more opportunities for points and introduce new game mechanics midway through a playthrough. It’s a neat concept, and provides some variability and replayability to an otherwise pretty straightforward game. But it also made the first half of a play-through feel a bit bland, and the game tended to run quite long especially with four players. For those reasons, we prefer our picks.
Scythe is complex and evocative, with wonderful layers of strategy and tactical decisions wrapped up in a steampunk theme that’s a joy to immerse yourself in. But, specifically in terms of its being a strategy game, we think that Root takes better advantage of similar asymmetric strategy ideas, that Brass: Birmingham has more-involved and satisfying economic choices, and that Arnak presents a fresher mix of mechanics and theme. Scythe is still a wonderful experience, but we think our picks are better examples of modern strategy-game design.
Terraforming Mars is one of the better-known games we tested. Its card play is similar to that of Ark Nova (and it comes with an even larger deck), and its engine-building feedback loop is very satisfying. But we found Ark Nova to be more enjoyable in our testing.
The White Castle is a worker and dice placement game set in 1700s Japan and is about players trying to earn renown for their clan by doing work around the titular white castle. Players select dice from a common pool and place them in various locations to take associated actions, often to collect resources to power more valuable actions later. It’s pretty straightforward and fairly easy to teach once you know what the actions and rewards are. But in our playthroughs we found that it wasn’t as engaging or entertaining as our picks.
Wingspan is also among our favorite games. But even though we love it, we don’t think it’s as strong of a strategy game as our picks. The engine-building game offers a wonderful, relaxing time, and it really took off (get it?) when it was released in 2019. Wingspan is a great introduction to the board-gaming hobby, but it lacks the depth of the similarly environmentally themed Ark Nova.
This article was edited by Ben Keough and Erica Ogg.
