Board gaming is reveling in a quality glut the likes of which it has never seen. Whether you want cheap board games, games for beginners, fantasy games, or more, you’ll find plenty of terrific options. Between its growing popularity, publishers and Kickstarter, designers can get projects to market like never before. But that presents consumers with a problem. How to keep track of what’s coming out, when to expect it, and what looks like it might be worth your gaming dollars?
That’s where we step in to try and help. But since January hasn’t been the biggest month for board game releases, we’re going to start this series of release round-ups with some great games, expansions, and Kickstarters from the end of December.
Board Game New Releases
Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated
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The original Clank! was an odd and charming deck-building game of dungeon delving and dragon avoidance. This all-new version gives it the Legacy treatment, turning your one-off treasure hunts into a narrative campaign. Along the way, you’ll be adding stickers and sharpie text to make your copy uniquely yours. Best of all, though, it expands the sometimes uneven nature of the previous game without losing any of that goofy charm. Now you can personalize your character and explore new options with more chances to tactically tune your deck or plan a long term strategy.
Maracaibo
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This looks like some kind of Caribbean trading game from the age of pirates, replete with rather odious colonial trimmings. If you can get past that, beneath there’s a dense Eurogame with far more options and depth than its rules might suggest. It’s an efficiency race around Caribbean islands. Players must struggle to balance card and action management with good, old-fashioned navigation. There are many ways to win, from exploration to ship-building to personalized objectives. It’s up to you to make the best of your plethora of options every turn, mixing and matching your way to victory.
Paladins of the West Kingdom
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Designer Shem Philips has made a name for himself transforming the mechanic of worker placement with fun, fresh ideas. This, his latest game, is a little more traditional. It’s a deep, rich strategy game, filled with a challenging confusion of choices in which long term planning is essential. Players need to fortify their city against outside raiders, with the help of the titular Paladin cards adding even more options. Its clever twist is that you can shortcut the hard work with shady dealing, but you’ll get saddled with suspicion. If you’ve got the most when the inquisition arrives, watch out.
Coloma
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Coloma is the town where the California gold rush started. It’s also the name of this neat engine-building game themed around the fevered speculations of the era. But this isn’t just another same-old genre clone. It boasts a neat magnetic widget in the middle of the board that lets players choose actions simultaneously. The reason for this is that the most popular spots get closed off, busted with too much speculation. It transforms what can often be a rather staid class of game into a vicious swamp of interaction and doublethink. And don’t worry: the engine building underneath is still as sharp as its peers.
Tsuro: Phoenix Rising
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The original Tsuro is a fast, family-weight game where you played path tiles from your hand for your dragon to move along. You had to keep things flexible and avoid crashing into other players or going off the board. It was, however, a bit lightweight for extended appeal. This new Phoenix edition not only looks beautiful but boasts a beautifully simple new element. The path tiles are double-sided and players can flip and rotate them during play. This simple addition adds depth without adding any real rules weight, making this a strong crossover game contender.
Battle Line: Medieval Edition
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This is a cheeky inclusion as it’s not really a new game. It’s an updated edition of Battle Line, also known as Schotten Totten. But it’s such a great two-player game that we felt it deserved showcasing all over again. The game revolves around building up poker-like formations on each side of nine flags. But with a limit hand of cards, each play is an excruciating balance of strategy, luck and bluff. This medieval version showcases some fantastic new art and a novel terrain expansion to tempt existing fans.
New Board Game Expansions
Terraforming Mars: Turmoil
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The newest expansion for one of the biggest hits of recent years, Turmoil adds more of what you’d expect. More cards, corporations, and other elements to throw into your base game. There’s also a whole new class of events with their own board: you can see these coming and plan your strategies accordingly. The titular turmoil however, is the real meat here, bringing politics to Mars for the first time. You command a bunch of delegates, throwing their weight behind political parties. But be careful which you back as whoever gets elected offers a slew of game-changing bonuses.
Seasons of Inis
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Inis is the best of the “waros,” a small group of games that combine Euro-esque efficiency mechanics with cut-throat brawling. This long-awaited expansion adds five optional modules you can mix and match into your base game as you like. The biggest allows you to add a fifth player, which tightens up the game’s already brutal competition even more. Other options include seafaring with harbors and, of course, seasons which adds new ways to score points. It’s a great way to extend the shelf life of an already great game.
New Board Games on Kickstarter
Oath
Cole Wehrle designed Pax Pamir, which we named among the best board games of 2019. He’s also the most innovative board game designer working today. Oath is his next project and it’s a doozy. It’s a fantasy empire building game with a fresh new twist: the results of each game feed into the next. It’s not a standard “Legacy” style game with stickers, sharpies and sealed envelopes. Rather, it’s a more open narrative, an epic shared history of a world from tyranny to revolutions. Boasting novel mechanics that combines strategic, social and diplomatic elements, this could be a whole new breed of game.
Foundations of Rome
The Century trilogy has become a benchmark in easy to learn, accessible games that still offer lots of variety and challenge. Their designer aims to top that achievement with this stunning looking game that rebuilds Rome in an hour or so. Packed with plastic to make a realistic-looking ancient city, it has players buy plots and add buildings to the shared board. But you can’t waste coins on pointless frippery. The buildings you add are also an economic engine to expand your architectural empire.
Return to Dark Tower
Gamers of a certain age will go weak at the knees over the words “Dark Tower,” either because this early ’80s electronic delight enthralled them, or because they never got given a copy as a kid. Either way, you’ve got a new chance to adventure in the confines of the tower. This isn’t a reprint but a ground-up redesign, using the best bits of the original to inform a modern cooperative strategy game. It’s from Restoration Games who did such a great job doing the same with Fireball Island that we listed it as an essential kids’ game. Pledge levels include an option for a slew of sweet plastic miniatures.
Source: IGN.com January 2020 Board Games: New Releases, Kickstarters, and Expansions