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2021 Top BGG Heavy Games

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BoardGameGeek has been releasing collections of games in different categories leading into the holiday gift-giving season. They have come upon their list of “Heavy Games” – ones that hard-core gamers enjoy. There were five on their list, and I touched each of them.

Steel Whisper's custom paint of a Nemesis Intruder, from BGG https://boardgamegeek.com/image/4464180/nemesis
Intruder from Nemesis

Three of the five are reimplementations of prior games. I think that’s a little sad, but also indicative of the source of the list: polling gamers. But a good meaty game is not that easy to spin out.

  • Nemesis (2018) – As mentioned, this is a veiled implementation of the movie Aliens (1986). I’ve played it twice, and it does a good job of what it sets out to do. You will likely die. In the second play of this I managed to survive on luck and guts and earn a co-win, blowing up the ship with one of the players in hibernation at the end.
  • Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy (2020) – This game reimplements Eclipse (2011), which I have played five times. It’s a massive ships n bits, explore and destroy, epic-length game. I don’t know the details of the update, but I’m sure it delivers a similar experience.
  • Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition (2021) – This game reimplements Clash of Cultures (2012) and includes several expansions and the base game together. I played the original once in 2014 and don’t much remember it. It’s similar to Eclipse in that it’s hex tiles creating a map, development of controlled areas, and exploration and battling of uncontrolled areas.
  • Dominant Species: Marine (2021) – I’ve played the precursor, Dominant Species (2010), to this one three times. I enjoy the theme and the execution, but it’s a quite lengthy game and I have to be in that mood. This game as well as theming it to the underwater realm changes up several of the mechanisms from the original. I haven’t heard from anyone who’s played both (but i’m sure some of the reviewers make the comparison).
  • Hallertau (2020) – I briefly picked this one up at the recent BGG.Con 2021 in the library, but set it back on the shelves. It was hefty and after a quick look, I didn’t think I had time to read and play this new one. I enjoy other Uve Rosenberg designed games, and would prob’ly like this one. Though many of his are so hefty, I don’t care to revisit them often. It’s a hefty worker placement, with enough added on that it should seem a little fresh.

BGG.Con 2010, Part 2

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I talked about the games I was hoping to play and did in my first post. Many of the games fall into multiple of the categories I broke them into, I’m grouping them with whichever group my whims lead me to.  These are games I wasn’t planning on playing or didn’t know about, but did play.

Not on My Radar: On the Table

Carcassonne: Wheel of Fortune (2009)  This is a modification of Carcassonne (2000), a tile laying game.  I find the original quite fun and portable, and good for a various number of people (though it can slow down with higher numbers). For a while I was on a bit of a collecting binge for Carcassonne expansions, but some of them just aren’t that fun or elegant.  So the additions to this game slipped off my radar.

This is a nice change to the original and comes as a complete game itself.  All the tiles are nicely marked with a subtle wheel, so you can sort them out of you’ve combined them with other sets. The addition of the “wheel” which moves when a specially marked tile is played, the wheel is located on a central 16×16 sized location that you can play your tiles off of.

This is a nice change to the start game, from the highly suggested The River (2001) and/or The River II (2005). The Wheel of Fortune part of the game will score or penalize something each time it is moved.  It’s a somewhat random element, but not overly so.  I would definitely suggest this version to beginning gamers as a gateway type game.

Sator Erepo Tenet Opera Rotas (2008) – This game has been sitting around at one of my regular gamer’s house since it came out, and we’ve never played it.  It maxes out at 4 players, and we often have more than that.  It also doesn’t play ideally with 2-3 players.  I ended up at a table where someone had pulled this out.  It looked interesting. I played.

It was a great game and I really enjoyed it. Four players is a must.  You are trying to navigate swinging passages over a cavern.  You play cards to allow various movements.  It was quite enjoyable.  The text on the cards can be a bit difficult, but they are explained in the rules. Continue reading →